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

Game portability


Polishing is the best phase where game portability should be increased to its maximum level without affecting the game itself. In this phase, portability can be increased in three ways:

  • Support for various screen sizes

  • Support for multiple resolutions

  • Support for multiple hardware configurations

Support for various screen sizes

Android has a lot of variety in terms of screen size. The game control system is the main segment affected by varying sizes. When a game is designed, the control system is also planned according to user convenience.

For Android mobile game development, Android tablet controls are usually a bit different from Android mobile controls. The screen size of tabs is usually bigger than mobiles. So, there is more space to be used by the user. The game should be optimized for both small and big screen scenarios for ease of control.

Support for multiple resolutions

In contrast, there are Android devices that have the same screen size, but different resolutions. In...