Preface

Android has become the number one platform for mobile phones and tablets, and its popularity is still rising. Mobile game markets have become a great place for both professionals and indie game developers to present their games.

AndEngine was created by Nicolas Gramlich to ease the development of 2D games for Android devices. Since the beginning, AndEngine helped to create many successful games such as Traktor Digger, Construction City, and Bad Roads.

AndEngine is a full-featured open source engine. Its advantage is its simplicity. It is complete and makes creating any 2D game possible, and yet it is still easy to use. Moreover, AndEngine lets programmers use any part of the underlying Android SDK with no limitations.

Learning AndEngine is meant to teach the basics of AndEngine. It's a step-by-step guide to creating a simple game. Through the tutorial, all the basic features of AndEngine are presented in a concise way, making it easy to follow. The book starts with the installation of the required software, making a blueprint of the game, and follows with gradually adding features to the game as the readers learn them. Finally, a game is polished and released for a beta test in the most popular Android application store, the Google Play store.

The AndEngine source code exists in three versions. This book deals with the latest and most commonly used branch called the GLES2—AnchorCenter branch. It uses a newer graphics library, and it is stable and complete.