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

Exploring Android mobiles


Android mobile devices are the most important devices for game developers. Mobile technology has undergone a huge revolution during the last decade, from the black and white pixel phone to modern age smartphones. Currently, Android mobile devices are leading the market by a huge margin compared to its nearest competitor, the iPhone.

Initial Android gaming got its momentum after the release of Android version 1.6, followed by Android 2.3. Even today, there are many devices running on Android 2.3. That is why many of the popular cross-platform gaming engines support Android 2.3.

There was a time when Android used to run with a minimum requirement of 32 MB of RAM, 32 MB of disk space, and a 200 MHz processor as well. If we take a look at current device specifications, a drastic change can be noticed. Nowadays, Android mobile devices have 1 GB RAM, 1 GHz processor, and 4 GB disk space on an average. Most of the devices have multicore processing units. However, this rise...