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

Optimizing 2D assets


Any digital game cannot be made without 2D art assets. There must be 2D assets in some form inside the game. So, as far as game component optimization is concerned, every 2D asset should also be optimized. Optimization of 2D assets means these three main things.

Size optimization

Each asset frame should only contain the effective pixels to be used in games. Unnecessary pixels increase the asset size and memory use during runtime.

Data optimization

Not all images require full data information for pixels. A significant amount of data might be stored in each pixel, depending on the image format. For example, full screen opaque images should never contain transparency data. Similarly, depending on the color set, images must be formatted in 8-bit, 16-bit, or 24-bit format.

Image optimization tools can be used to perform such optimizations.

Process optimization

The larger the amount of data compressed during optimization, the more time it takes to decompress it and load it to memory...