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

Google Play Services


Google is currently the largest platform for Android applications. Moreover, Google is the owner of the Android OS. So, there can be no one better than Google to be the service provider for the Android platform.

Google Play Services is a background service for all Android devices to access all Google service product APIs. It was launched in 2012 to support Android development and take it to the next level.

The most used services in the Google Play Services package are:

  • Google Analytics

  • Google IAB

  • Google Leaderboard

  • Push notifications

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a service to track each and every event in the game. This can reveal user behavior, user actions, the number of users playing per day, each user's playing time, and so on. So, no data can go unnoticed by the developer. This analytic data helps developers identify the critical sections in the game. With this help, the developer can improve the game for better experience.

Significance

It is not always possible to...