General

• Introduction
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Roadmap
• Release notes

Basics

• Getting Started
  • Get LITIENGINE
  • Installation and Setup
  • Run the Game
• Game API
  • Game.graphics()
  • Game.audio()
  • Game.physics()
  • Game.loop()
  • Game.world()
  • Game.window()
  • Game.screens()
• Input API
  • Input.keyboard()
  • Input.mouse()
  • Input.gamepads()
• Configuration
• Tile Maps
  • Map Objects
  • Custom Properties
• Resource Management
  • Texture Atlas
  • Sprite Info Files
• Entity Framework
  • Default Entity Types
  • Subscribe to Entity Events
  • Annotations for static information
• Control Entities
  • Entity Controllers
  • Animation Controller
  • Movement Controller
  • Behavior Controller
  • Messaging System
  • Ability Framework
• User Interface
  • GuiComponents: An Overview
  • Creating Menus
• utiLITI
  • Create Projects
  • Import maps
• Deployment
• Savegames
• Libraries and Tools

Tutorials

• Creating a Simple Platformer
• Creating an Arkanoid Clone
• Working with the Sample projects

Getting Started

Chose an IDE

We highly recommend you to develop your LITIENGINE game with an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). This will serve you with a ton of useful development tools, like code completion, debugging, build tools, unit test execution and much more that a plain text editor simply doesn't provide.

At gurkenlabs, we use the famous Eclipse IDE. But IntelliJ IDEA is also a valid choice if you prefer it. Both of them are free-to-use.

Currently, there is no build-in support for any IDE but for future releases we plan to develop plugins that will help you creating and developing a LITIENGINE project.

We've already started development on a LITIENGINE Eclipse Plugin.

Chose a build system

We also recommend you to get familiar with Gradle or Maven because these tools can help you greatly when developing Java projects. LITIENGINE itself is build upon Gradle and uses it to seamlessly manage its build steps and dependent libraries.

Of course, it's still possible to just download the LITIengine .jar and import and use the library manually the "oldschool" way.

We don't encourage using a manually downloaded .jar for your game project. Trust us, it will be way easier for you in the future to update dependencies on e.g. the LITIENGINE and to better control and integrate the whole development life cycle.

Assuming that you chose Eclipse IDE and Gradle, you can create gradle project if you follow as below.

• if there is no gradle plugin at your Eclipse, go to Help > Eclipse Marketplace to search and install gradle integration.
• click File > New > Other and select Gradle Project as wizard.

Initialize the project structure

Now, depending on the chosen build system, your project structure might look slightly different. The LITIENGINE doesn't restrict you in how you want to organize your project. However there are some common practices that we think are useful to apply for a Game project with the LITIENGINE:

• store your resources in src folders
• create multiple sub-folders for different types of resources
• save all the resources for your game within the project folder

An example LITIENGINE project structure

game-project
└─── sprites
│   │─── sprite1.png
│   └─── ...
│─── audio
│   │─── sound1.ogg
│   └─── ...
│─── maps
│   │─── map1.tmx
│   │─── tileset.tsx
│   │─── tileset.png
│   └─── ...
│─── localization
│   │─── strings.properties
│   │─── strings_de_DE.properties
│   └─── ...
│─── src
│   └─── com
│        └─── mygame
│             │─── Program.java
│             └─── ...
│─── .classpath
│─── game.litidata
│─── config.properties
└───...

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Last updated 1 month ago

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