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

Android AVDs


AVDs are the most significant and important part of debugging Android games. In the initial stages, the concept started with an emulator. There are a few predefined emulators that can be used to run the build on a development PC. An Android emulator provides an interface of a real-time-like device.

AVDs have a few features that virtually provide the device RAM, Android version, screen size, display dpi, keyboard, and different visual skins. Older AVDs mostly looked the same.

In the current version of Android Studio, most of the Android device categories are provided. Developers can create AVDs as per the target development platform.

The categories are as follows:

  • Android mobile phones

  • Android tablets

  • Android TVs

  • Android wearables

AVDs can be created or manipulated by the AVD manager tool provided within the Android SDK. Each and every attribute of AVD can be managed by the AVD manager. This tool can also help the developer to create a custom AVD.

Let's have a look at the attribute factors...