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

User retention techniques


Creating a good user base might not be enough to generate decent revenue to gain profit out of the game. Hence comes the term user retention. This means the number of users who are playing the game repeatedly.

Users may download a game, and after a few game sessions, they may never come back. In another scenario, the user may come back again and again to the game. User retention is calculated on time parameters such as weekly or monthly use. This means how many users are coming back to the game within the given time period.

Free and freemium game revenue mostly depends on user retention, because the developer converts the time spent inside the game into revenue through several revenue generations plans. That is why user retention becomes important for doing business with games.

There are many techniques to improve user retention other than the core metagame. Let's discuss the major techniques through these points:

  • Daily bonus

  • Leaderboards and achievements

  • Offerwall integration...