I thought about Scala, but the Scala plugin for Android Studio is rumored to be buggy and Scala doesn't integrate well with Gradle build system. At least I couldn't get it to work and I gave up after a while. If they (Google) wanted Scala to be supported on Android, they would make sure it isn't such a pain. And some documentation - all I could turn to for help is a handful of random blog entries etc.

This Libgdx sample worked better for me, although I had to remove a bunch of ios bits to get it to work on my non-mac.

https://github.com/ajhager/libgdx-sbt-project.g8

Thanks for the tip. Did you get it to work with Android Studio? (I guess guidelines for IntelliJ Idea would apply)