Horton John - Android: game programming: extend your game development skills by harnessing the power of Android SDK: a course in three modules

, Learning Java by Building Android Games , starts off with the Java fundamentals and their use in an Android environment to make a simple math quiz game. You will be building your very own Android UI using easy to-use tools in Android Studio. You will learn to add real-time interaction with Java threads and implement locking/handling screen rotation, pixel graphics, clicks, animation, sound FX, and many other features in your games. It also covers the advanced OOP concepts for building and deploying a graphical pong-style game. This module ends with exploring different APIs and implement advanced features such as online leaderboards and achievements using Google game services

, Android Game Programming by Example , is a whirlwind tour of as many Android 2D gaming features that can possibly be squeezed into 11 chapters. Every line of the code used to build three games of increasing difficulty is shown in the text of this module and explained in a straightforward manner. It is steadily built up to implement a flexible and advanced game engine that uses OpenGL ES 2 for fast smooth frame rates. This is achieved by starting with a simple game and gradually increasing the complexity of the three complete games built step by step. You will implementing cool features like sprite sheet character animation and scrolling parallax backgrounds and be designing and implementing genuinely challenging and playable platform game levels. You will then learn to code both basic and advanced collision detection and make the math behind 2D rotation, velocity, and collision simple. Later on you will learn how to run your game designs at 60 frames per second or better and also process multi-touch screen input. By the end of this module, you will be implementing a multitude of other game features like pickups, firing weapons, HUDs, generating and playing sound FX, scenery, level transition, high scores, and more.

, Mastering Android Game Development , will help you build a real-time game from scratch using the Android SDK. This module will make you understand the internals of a game engine and each of its components. You will learn to decide when to use each of the different ways of drawing on Android. Moving forward, you will learn to handle user inputs, from virtual joysticks to gamepads, collision detection using different techniques and discover how to optimize it for complex games. You will also learn about animations and particle system and how to implement it in your game before you finally move on to tackle the challenges faced while making it available on Google play for Android TV.

Any recent and free version of Eclipse or Android Studio running on any of the major operating systems can use the code in this course.

Android Studio is the recommended development tool, and at time of publication, the minimum system requirements are:

For Windows:

For Mac OS X:

On Mac OS, run Android Studio with Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 for optimized font rendering. You can then configure your project to use JDK 6 or JDK 7.

For Linux:

Tested on Ubuntu 14.04, Trusty Tahr (64-bit distribution capable of running 32-bit applications).