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

Optimizing overall performance


Earlier, we discussed performance optimization from only the programming point of view. Let's discuss other scopes of optimizing the performance of Android games.

The developer can optimize performance from the time of design to development through the following points:

  • Choosing the base resolution

  • Defining the portability range

  • Program structure

  • Managing the database

  • Managing the network connection

Choosing the base resolution

From the point of view of game development on Android, choosing the base resolution is probably the most significant design decision. Base resolution defines the scale of the graphical or visual element. The larger the resolution that the developer chooses to work upon, the more storage and process time it takes. Base resolution is also responsible for the quality and color information to be stored with bitmaps. Comparatively lower resolution does not demand many details in the visible asset, which can optimize bitmap data. However, as the resolution...