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

Introducing the camera object


Cameras can have many purposes when it comes to designing a large-scale game, but its main objective is to display a particular area of the game world on the device's display. This topic is going to introduce the base Camera class, covering the general aspects of the camera in order to provide a reference for future camera use.

How to do it…

Cameras are important in game development as they control what we see on the device. Creating our camera is as easy as the following code:

final int WIDTH = 800;
final int HEIGHT = 480;
    
// Create the camera
Camera mCamera = new Camera(0, 0, WIDTH, HEIGHT);

The WIDTH and HEIGHT values will define the area of the game's scene that will be displayed on the device.

How it works…

It's important to get to know the main functions of a camera in order to make the most of it in our projects. All of the different cameras inherit the methods found in this topic. Let's take a look at some of the most necessary camera methods needed for...