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

Summary


Since Android API level 15, the framework supports OpenGL ES 2.0. This gave immense flexibility to graphic programmers to implement shaders in Android games.

Almost every hardware configuration supports shaders to run on GPU. However, the scale of using shaders determines the performance. In modern day, this is not actually an issue.

Shaders are being used widely in games. In every aspect of graphical programming, shaders have already proven their place. All the famous and successful game developers have acknowledged the importance of shaders. Graphic artists need not worry about everything visual in the game, which reduces the development time significantly.

Shaders are, therefore, widely used in games. Newer shaders are coming up with additional features now. The upgrading cycle of shaders has become less. However, hardware is also being upgraded with newer technology to support the graphical updates.

It feels like magic to see a simple cube turn into anything that has the same orientation...