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

Basic guide to develop games with the Cardboard SDK


Developing games for the Cardboard SDK or any other VR component is not similar to other Android games. Let's have a quick look at the basics of Cardboard development styles and standards through these points:

  • Launching and exiting the VR game

  • VR device adaptation

  • Display properties

  • In-game components

  • Game controls

  • Game audio setup

  • User focus assistance

  • Ultimate VR experience

Launching and exiting the VR game

Normally, after launching an Android game, it performs a few automated tasks and takes the user to the menu to choose an action. In the case of VR games, it takes time to mount the Android device to a VR headset properly, so the developer does not perform any automated task just after launching the game. The game should wait for the user to start it after it is in the perfect situation for running.

For better and common experience, the game should prompt the user with a VR sign or button to start the VR game.

There are two possible exits for a...