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 game development constraints


From the perspective of 2D game development, the main constraints are as follows:

  • 2D art assets

  • 2D rendering system

  • 2D mapping

  • 2D physics

2D art assets

Art asset constraints are mainly limited to graphical or visual assets, which include images, sprites, and fonts. It is not difficult to understand that a larger asset will take more time to process and render than a smaller asset, resulting in less performance quality.

Sets of 2D art assets

It is not possible to deliver maximum display quality with a single set of assets in Android game development. This is the reason most Android game developers choose high-resolution assets as their base build. This normally performs well for high-configuration hardware platforms, but does not provide quality performance on low-configuration devices. Many developers opt for the option of porting for multiple resolution hardware platforms. This again takes time to complete the project.

Same asset set for multiple resolutions

Many times...