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

3D game development constraints


3D game development in Android native is very complicated. The Android framework does not support direct 3D game development platforms. 2D game development is directly supported by Android Canvas. The developer requires OpenGL support to develop 3D games for Android.

Development is supported by Android NDK, which is based on C++. We will discuss a few constraints of 3D development for Android with OpenGL support.

Android provides the OpenGL library for development. The developer needs to set up scenes, light, and camera first to start any development process.

Vertices and triangles

Vertex refers to a point in 3D space. In Android, Vector3 can be used to define the vertices. A triangle is formed by three such vertices. Any triangle can be projected onto a 2D plane. Any 3D object can be simplified to a collection of triangles surrounding its surface.

For example, a cube surface is a collection of two triangles. Hence, a cube can be formed of 12 triangles as it has...