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

2D/3D performance comparison


Android game development in 2D and 3D is different. It is a fact that 3D game processing is heavier than 2D games. However, the game scale is always the deciding factor.

Different look and feel

3D look and feel is way different than 2D. The use of a particle system in 3D games is very common to provide visual effects. In the case of 2D games, sprite animation and other transformations are used to show such effects.

Another difference between 2D and 3D look and feel is dynamic light and shadow. Dynamic light is always a factor for greater visual quality. Nowadays, most 3D games use dynamic lighting, which has a significant effect on game performance. In the case of 2D games, light management is done through assets. So, there is no extra processing in 2D games for light and shadow.

In 2D games, the game screen is rendered on a Canvas. There is only one fixed point of view. So, the concept of camera is limited to a fixed camera. However, in 3D games, it is a different...