Book Image

AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook

By : JAYME SCHROEDER, Brian Boyles
Book Image

AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook

By: JAYME SCHROEDER, Brian Boyles

Overview of this book

AndEngine is a broad 2D game engine which allows game developers, both experienced and inexperienced, to develop games for the Android platform with ease. Don't be fooled by the simplicity, though. As easy as it is to “pick up and go,” AndEngine includes enough functionality to bring any type of 2D game world to life.The "AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook" contains all of the necessary information and examples in order to build the games as you imagine them. The book's recipes will walk you through the various aspects of game design with AndEngine and provides detailed instructions on how to achieve some of the most desirable effects for your games.The "AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook" begins with detailed information on some of the more useful structuring techniques in game design and general aspects of resource management. Continuing on, the book will begin to discuss AndEngine entities, including sprites, text, meshes, and more. Everything from positioning, to modifiers, and even tips on improving entity functionality with raw OpenGL capabilities. From here on, everything from applying physics to your game, working with multi-touch events and gestures, game optimization, and even an overview of the various AndEngine extensions will be covered.The book has a widerange of recipes, from saving and loading game data, applying parallax backgrounds to create a seemingly 3D world, relying on touch events to zoom the game camera, taking screen-shots of the device's screen, and performance optimization using object pools. If physics-based games are more interesting to you, there's also a list of recipes ranging from controlling the world forces and calculating forces applied to bodies, creating destructible objects, and even creating rag-dolls.Pong styled games were fun 35 years ago, but it is time to take your game to the next level with the AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using relative rotation


Rotating entities relative to the position of other entities in 2D space is a great function to know. The uses for relative rotation are limitless and always seems to be a "hot topic" for newer mobile game developers. One of the more prominent examples of this technique being used is in tower-defense games, which allows a tower's turret to aim towards the direction that an enemy, non-playable character is walking. In this recipe, we're going to introduce a method of rotating our Entity objects in order to point them in the direction of a given x/y position. The following image displays how we will create an arrow on the scene, which will automatically point to the position of the circle image, wherever it moves to:

Getting ready…

We'll need to include two images for this recipe; one named marble.png at 32 x 32 pixels in dimension and another named arrow.png at 31 pixels wide by 59 pixels high. The marble can be any image. We will simply drag this image around the scene...