Richard A. Rogers - Learning Android Game Programming: A Hands-On Guide to Building Your First Android Game

A Hands-On Guide to Building Your First Android Game

Rick Rogers

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Copyright 2012 Pearson Education, Inc.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-321-76962-6
ISBN-10: 0-321-76962-7

Text printed in the United States on recycled paper at RR Donnelley in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
First printing, December 2011

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For Susie, my muse and my partner

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are
the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Marcel Proust

In early 2010 the availability of powerful and free 2D game engines for the Android platform was an almost empty field. Today, developers can pick from a few engines that best fit the purpose of unleashing their individual creativity.

With currently more than 500,000 Android devices being activated daily, every single one of those is reachable from the minute the device is turned on. Literally, every day counts. This market is shifting the world of successful business models away from big companies toward individual developers, where any developer could create the Next Angry Birds in just one night.

I created AndEngine to fulfill the need for a free, easy-to-use game development framework, one capable of allowing even inexperienced game developers quick access to this incredibly fast-growing market without limiting the creativity of expert game developers.

Today more than two hundred games powered by AndEngine have been shipped and the AndEngine code has been executed over one million times. AndEngine has allowed developers to create games that successfully reach millions of customers and provide steady income for the developer. And since Zynga hired me mid-2011, AndEngine has been brought to a whole new level of professionalism.

More and more developers are demanding knowledge about game development on the Android platform, which means there is, and will continue to be, a strong need for solid instructional literature. Rick Rogers has written an excellent book covering general game development topics in simple language, using AndEngine as the powerful back end that brings game development to life. Rick guides the reader through the construction of a complete game example, covering all essential topics for beginners while providing useful tips and hints even for experienced game developers. Enjoy the book!

Nicolas Gramlich
Creator, AndEngine

This is a book about writing games for Android mobile devices. If you have at least some experience developing applications for Android, this book will tell you how to use that experience, combined with an open-source game engine called AndEngine, to write your own 2D mobile games. Whatever genre of game you want to write, examples are provided and explained step by step. The goal is for you to become familiar with AndEngine and publish your game as quickly as possible. Many of the examples support the development of an example game, Virgins Versus Vampires (V3).

The book begins by presenting an overview of mobile games, their popularity, the types of games, and an example of planning a game in . The following chapters then expand on a single topic related to developing your game:

, describes the tools that are used to develop games, including code development, artwork, and sound.

, introduces the concept of a game loop and shows you how to start development with AndEngine.

, dives into graphics and uncovers the scene transitions and entity modifiers that AndEngine provides to make a game come alive.

, goes deeper into developing bitmap and vector graphics for your game, and shows you how to display sprites.

, introduces easy ways to build animated sprites for your game, and really get things moving.

, gives examples of ways to use AndEngine to display text in your game.

, explores the many user input options available for Android games, including touch, multi-touch, keyboard, voice recognition, accelerometer, location, and compass.

, describes how AndEngine loads and works with tile maps and their tile sets to build virtual worlds that can be of infinite size.

, demonstrates the particle system built into AndEngine and shows how to define and save particle effects as XML files.

, shows you how to find, acquire, modify, and use background music and sound effects with AndEngine.

, explores the physics engine, Box2D, which works with AndEngine to facilitate building games based on the physical interaction of objects.

, examines some of the artificial intelligence techniques you can use to make your game smarter and more fun to play.

, builds a scoring framework based on collisions between elements of your game.

, investigates some of the extensions that are available for AndEngine to perform tasks such as creating Android live wallpapers, playing MOD music files, creating augmented reality games, and communicating among players in multiplayer games.

, finishes off the example game by completing or adding features to make it playable.