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 5. Understanding the Game Loop and Frame Rate

The game loop is the operational body of a game, and the frame rate is the consequence. A game cannot be made without a defined game loop, and the performance cannot be judged without measuring the frame rate.

These two aspects of game development are common throughout any game development project. However, the scalability and nature of the game loop vary across different devices, and there might be different scales to measure frame rates across different platforms.

For native development, the game loop is created and maintained by developers only. However, in most game engines, the loop is already defined with all the necessary controls and scope.

We will have a detailed look at these two most important parts of game development through the following topics:

  • Introduction to the game loop

  • Creating a sample game loop using the Android SDK

  • Game life cycle

  • Game update and user interface

  • Interrupt handling

  • General idea of a game state machine

  • The FPS...