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

Strategic placement of different debug statements


A debug statement is the most important part of any development process. Anything and everything can be tracked and traced through debug statements. However, being a system printing call, each debug statement comes with a cost on performance, which has a direct effect on runtime FPS. This is why a strategy on the placement of debug statements is absolutely necessary.

Let's have a look at the strategies related to following categories:

  • Memory allocation

  • Tracking the object state

  • Checking the program flow

  • Tracking object values

Memory allocation

In a game development object cycle, an object should be allocated once per initialization and deallocated on destruction. However, due to manual programming mistakes, developers forget to free the memory. In this case, the garbage collector cleans the memory when it is invoked by the system automatically. This way, a lag in performance is observed.

Now, as a strategic placement to trace such mistakes, two debug...