Installing Android development tools on Windows

Here is the list of all the prerequisites you will need to start developing games for Android:

Former versions of SDK/NDK for Windows required a Cygwin environment, a Linux-like environment for Windows, to be installed. Up-to-date versions of these tools can run natively on Windows without any intermediate layer. We will focus on the Cygwin-less environment and will do all of the development without IDE. You heard it right, we will just use the command line. All the examples in this book were written and debugged on a Windows PC.

To compile native Windows applications presented in this book, you will need a decent C++ compiler, such as the MinGW package with a GCC toolchain. Using Microsoft Visual Studio is also possible.

All tools have pretty decent GUI installers (see the following image, that shows the Android SDK Manager from SDK R21) so you don't have to use the command line.

For the Windows environment, you need the MinGW GCC toolchain. The easy to install all-in-one package can be found at http://www.equation.com, in the Programming Tools section, Fortran, C, C++ subsection. Alternatively, you can download the official installer from http://www.mingw.org. We will use the one from www.equation.com

You need to set some environment variables to let the tools know where the files are located. The JAVA_HOME variable should point to the Java Development Kit folder. The NDK_HOME variable should point to the Android NDK installation folder, and ANDROID_HOME should point to the Android SDK folder (note the double backslash). We used the following environment variable values:

JAVA_HOME=D:\Java\jdk1.6.0_23

NDK_HOME=D:\ndk

ANDROID_HOME=D:\\android-sdk-windows

The final configuration looks similar to the one shown in the following screenshot, which shows the Windows Environment Variables dialog box:

After MinGW has been successfully installed, you should also add the bin folder from its installation folder to the PATH environment variable. For example, if MinGW is installed to C:\MinGW, then PATH should contain the C:\MinGW\bin folder.