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

General idea of a game state machine


A game state machine runs within the update cycle of the game loop. A game state machine is the mechanism of binding all the game states together. In old techniques, this was a typical linear control flow. However, in modern development processes, it can be parallel control running in multiple threads. In the old architecture of game development, it was encouraged to have only one game thread. Developers used to avoid parallel processing as it was vulnerable to game loop and timer management. However, even in modern development, many developers still prefer to use a single thread for game development whenever possible. With the help of various tools and advanced scripting language, most game developers now use a virtual parallel processing system.

One of the processes of a simple game state machine is to create a common state interface and override it for each game state. In this way, it becomes easy to manage the state inside the game loop.

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