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 3. Different Android Development Tools

We have already discussed the different Android target devices for game development. In this chapter, we will take a look at the different ways and tools to develop games for Android. Other than development skill and knowledge, it is very important to know about the helpful software that can make the development process easier and effective.

Android game development is supported or backed by many powerful tools and libraries. Let's have a look at the list of mandatory tools for the development process:

  • Android SDK

  • Android Development Tool

  • Android Virtual Device

  • Android Debug Bridge

  • Dalvik Debug Monitor Server

These are the must-have tools that should be installed in an Android game developer's system. Without these, it is impossible to develop anything for the Android platform. Although ADB and AVD are not mandatory for development, they are required to test and deploy the game on physical as well as virtual devices in order to debug the game.