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

User acquisition techniques


If a game has no users, it is as good as scrap. This does not mean that the game quality or design is bad. In the Android gaming market, more than 5 million games are published. Hundreds of games are being published every day, which is increasing the competition.

In this immense crowd, a single game may disappear, irrespective of its quality, but due to having a poor or no marketing strategy. A game can only be successful if it has a significant number of users and good retention.

Let's have a look at few of the user acquisition techniques through the following topics:

  • Game promotion channels

  • Game blogs and forum discussions

  • Paid user acquisitions

  • Other techniques

Game promotion channels

There are several ways to promote the game in the market. There are some game promotion channels that advertise in various mediums. A specific game genre channel promotes the same kind of games. Let's look at few of these mediums:

  • YouTube channels

  • Android forums

  • Sports forums

  • Facebook promotions...