You can be a Lumberjack!

You too can live out your fantasy as a big burly muscular manly man that all the women adore... Without leaving your living room. Behind your desk at work, on the train, or just relaxing at home, chopping wood has never been so easy and fun... In fact, you don't even have to lift an axe.

Try LoggerBill, the second release from MapleScot development and our first to use the LibGDX game development library. It is inspired by a game that is currently very popular on Android and iOS devices, but naturally we think our version is better.

Instructions

Use the left and right arrow keys to stand on that side and swing your axe.
As you chop out 'chunks' of the tree the branches will move down, don't let them hit you!
Chop as fast as you can - a timer at the top of the screen quickly runs down and you need to chop to replenish it.
The further you go, the faster the time drains... You need to chop faster and faster to keep going.

Details

After writing The Shaft we felt that we had a pretty good understanding of Mobile Development, but we would like the option to port future games to other platforms. We decided to give LibGDX a try as a framework for future development. We were drawn to LibGDX because it is entirely Java, cross platform, feature-rich, open source, and non-restrictive. As game developers (not designers) we wanted to write as much of the 'engine' ourselves as possible. LibGDX gave us the tools to design and build the game the way we wanted to without excessive overhead. The tools provided simply compliment the code to ease common tasks and allow us to focus on the game. Ultimately We wrote this game as a quick and simple test to evaluate LibGDX to ensure that it would meet our needs. You may notice that it's similar to a certain other wood-cutting game on the market. We learned a lot from writing this simple game and hope to demonstrate to others how a simple, but popular game can be written in LibGDX for Android. In particular it was important to us that the user experience be smooth. The Back-button often doesn't work on games ported over from Apple devices and this vexes us greatly, so we've take care to make sure that everything works as one would expect for a quality game.

We are still learning though, this is only our second game so we need your help to bring our many (more original) ideas to the world. So, we've released this game as Open Source. We would like to invite everyone to view our code. If you use our ideas, designs, or have learned anything from our code we would love to hear from you and we would love to have your feedback and suggestions on how to improve the game or how to improve our code.

Get more details and the link to the source code here

As a demo of the capabilities of LibGDX this game demonstrates:

• Use of Google Play Games
  • Achievements
  • Leaderboards
  • Cloud Save
  • Admob Ads
• Smooth transition from screens, menus, popup dialogs. Back button works logically.
• OpenGL Shaders for night-time and ghost effects
• Loading of Assets while a loading animation plays
• Use of JSON Skins and deserialization
• Particle effects for wood chips
• Sound and Music
• Scene2d layouts