Chapter 5. Making Your Bird More Flightworthy

Flappee Bee is flying pretty fine now, don't you think? However, we are still not done! This chapter will focus a bit more on the tools available to us in LibGDX. We will take a look at the AssetManager class and see how it can be used to make our life better. We will then use it to create a loading screen so that we can load our textures and at the same time provide feedback to the user that the game is doing something. We will then take this a step further and look at how we can combine our assets into a single entity and explain why this is a good habit to get into. Finally, we will look at Hiero, the font converter, which is built into LibGDX to allow us to convert and style fonts as we desire.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Loading assets asynchronously with the AssetManager class
• Creating a loading screen
• Using a texture packer to combine all the assets into a single texture
• Hiero—the LibGDX font...