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

Summary


We looked at Android NDK briefly in this chapter and cleared a few doubts on native development. There are many developers who think that developing games in a native language gives enormous processing power. This is, however, not always true. Processing and performance depend on the development style and standard. In most common scenarios, the difference between native development and SDK development is negligible.

OpenGL works with Android in any scenario. The backend rendering is based on OpenGL for both NDK and SDK. We have already discussed all the technical aspects of OpenGL. Here, you learned which version of OpenGL works with Android and what we should use. Clearly, OpenGL ES 2.0 is a good choice as most Android devices support it. On the other hand, OpenGL ES 1.0 is obsolete, and OpenGL ES 3.0 is not supported by most Android devices yet.

Until now, we have covered almost every aspect of Android game development. However, finishing the implementation for the game does not...