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

C++ for games – pros and cons


There is a never-ending debate between C++ and Java. However, we will not go into the controversy and will try to look at them from the perspective of game development. C++ has a slight performance edge over Java, and Java is known for its simplicity.

There may be many programmers who are more comfortable in C++ than Java, or vice versa. In game development, personal choice of programming language does not matter. Hence, using NDK or SDK has to be determined depending on the requirements. It is always recommended that you use the Android SDK to develop an application rather than using the NDK.

Let's discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using native language for game programming.

Advantages of using C++

Let's first have a look at the positive side of using C++ for game programming through the following points:

  • Universal game programming language

  • Cross platform portability

  • Faster execution

  • CPU architecture support

Universal game programming language

In the case of...