Book Image

The Android Game Developer's Handbook

By : Avisekhar Roy
Book Image

The Android Game Developer's Handbook

By: Avisekhar Roy

Overview of this book

Gaming in android is an already established market and growing each day. Previously games were made for specific platforms, but this is the time of cross platform gaming with social connectivity. It requires vision of polishing, design and must follow user behavior. This book would help developers to predict and create scopes of improvement according to user behavior. You will begin with the guidelines and rules of game development on the Android platform followed by a brief description about the current variants of Android devices available. Next you will walk through the various tools available to develop any Android games and learn how to choose the most appropriate tools for a specific purpose. You will then learn JAVA game coding standard and style upon the Android SDK. Later, you would focus on creation, maintenance of Game Loop using Android SDK, common mistakes in game development and the solutions to avoid them to improve performance. We will deep dive into Shaders and learn how to optimize memory and performance for an Android Game before moving on to another important topic, testing and debugging Android Games followed by an overview about Virtual Reality and how to integrate them into Android games. Want to program a different way? Inside you’ll also learn Android game Development using C++ and OpenGL. Finally you would walk through the required tools to polish and finalize the game and possible integration of any third party tools or SDKs in order to monetize your game when it’s one the market!
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
The Android Game Developer's Handbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Challenges with the Android VR game market


We have already understood the technical challenges for developing VR games on the Android platform. Now, let's have a look at the other challenges that a developer might face while developing or monetizing VR games for Android:

  • Low target audience

  • Limited game genres

  • Long game sessions

  • Limited device support

  • Real-time constraints

Low target audience

There are very few Android users who are familiar with the VR concept and technology. Mostly, users are the common handset holders who do not have VR headsets. So, there is already a major section of the audience who are out of scope of VR gaming. This is why the VR gaming market is limited to the audience with VR headsets.

Limited game genres

We have already looked at the possible game genres in VR gaming. VR games cannot support all the game genres released to date and possibly will not be able to do so in the near future. This limitation is a serious challenge for the Android VR gaming market in securing...