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

Development insights on Android mobiles


As we discussed earlier, the main development target for any game developer on the Android platform are Android mobiles. We have also noticed the various technical specifications for Android mobiles. When a game developer targets this platform at its maximum possible scope, they must take a note of the device category.

Mostly, all Android devices support a common touch interface, a physical Home button, a physical Lock button, a Back button, and volume Up-Down keys for user interaction. Besides these, an accelerometer can be also a good medium for the user interface.

Gaming is mostly visual, so game developers should always look for the graphic performance of the device. There is a separate graphics processor in the latest Android mobiles, but the quality varies.

Visual excellence does not depend on GPU only—the display screen quality also matters a lot. Low PPI screens cannot deliver a high quality display. The first-generation Android G1 mobile had...