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

Chapter 1. Android Game Development

Developing games has become a very popular profession through the last decade. Previously, it was limited to PCs, consoles, and a few embedded gaming devices. Today's world is fully equipped with modern gadgets with better technology, better portability, better flexibility, and better quality. This has opened up the doors for developers to create games with better quality and fewer limitations.

Android is a modern age operating system, and is being used widely for many hardware platforms. Hence, the world of Android has become a target for game developers. The most efficient and useful targets are Android smartphones and tablets. According to surveys of the global market share for mobile OS, Android tops it with a 78-80% share in 2015. Android is now not only a mobile OS, it is being used in TVs and smart watches also. Hence, the popularity of Android is touching the sky among game developers.

This book will be helpful for those who already have a background in Android game development. Let's start with the following topics:

  • Android game development

  • A game is not just an application

  • Choosing target device configuration for your game

  • Best practices while making a game on Android