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

VR in Android games


Before the latest release of Android N, there was no direct support for VR in Android. Google has realized that VR is the future of applications. Previously, Google released the Cardboard SDK to develop VR applications on Android. This SDK is still out there in the market and is being used widely.

There are already many games in the market targeting Android VR headsets. The number of VR headsets is increasing day by day. VR was not part of mainstream Android game development, but it is believed that it will become mainstream very soon as Android has now included a special setting for VR.

History of Android VR games

In the late 70s, the VR system started evolving at a rapid speed with better equipment. The result is the inclusion of VR in the mainstream Android SDK in 2016. The latest Android devices are VR capable. It is believed that most of the upcoming devices will support VR headsets.

Previously, a high-end PC or console was required to operate VR headsets. But now, VR...