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

Common game development mistakes


It is not always possible to look into each and every performance aspect at every development stage. It is a very common practice to use assets and write code in a temporary mode and use it in the final game.

This affects the overall performance and future maintenance procedure. Here are few of the most common mistakes made during game development.

Use of non-optimized images

An artist creates art assets, and the developer directly integrates those into the game for the debug build. However, most of the time, those assets are never optimized, even for the release candidate.

This is the reason there may be plenty of high-bit images where the asset contains limited information. Alpha information may be found in opaque images.

Use of full utility third-party libraries

The modern day development style does not require each and every development module to be written from scratch. Most of the developers use a predefined third-party library for common utility mechanisms...