Chapter 1. As the Prophecy Foretold, a Hero is Born

Our journey begins with you, our hero, adventuring into the unknown in the hopes of starting and then finishing a role-playing game. We will discuss the history of role-playing games, the game features that we will develop throughout the book, and some considerations when evaluating the tools to help you develop your game. We will learn a brief history of game architecture, and how it relates to and differs from the architecture of LibGDX. Finally, we will look at the LibGDX project structure and run the default application so that we hit the ground running in the next chapter.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Understanding the fundamentals of role-playing games
• Technologies used when developing a role-playing game
• Understanding the basics of a game architecture
• Understanding the high-level component layout of LibGDX
• Understanding the application lifecycle of LibGDX
• Setting up your development environment
• Understanding the build environment and project structure
• Running the default demo project