Android Game Development

I have recently been looking into some Android game development, but with a very limited knowledge obout game development, I did not know how an Android game should be structured. I started looking around for information, and in this blog post I will share them with you.

A month ago I read the book Beginning Android Games by Mario Zechner who started the libgdx game development framework which can be used to create java games for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android.
The book covers many different and relevant topics about developing Android games, and most importantly, it is written for people who may not have any knowledge about Android and game development. Throughout the book, Zechner explains, by developing multiple fully working Android games, how to make a basic but good and extendable game engine. Both 2D and 3D games are covered, and basic game physics are explained as well. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to start making Android games.

After reading the book, I began playing around with the libgdx framework which turned out to be very flexible but yet simple. The framework is more powerful than the one explained in his book, but its structure is very similar. It is richly documented and there are good open source examples on the Google Code project page.

For creating textures, I found the TexturePacker application (Windows, Mac, Ubuntu) which is also mentioned on Mario Zechner's blog. The user interface is great and it has several layout preferences and can export textures to libgdx, cocos2d and JSON, among others. I have primarily used the application for making sprite sheets, by using its built-in sprite sheet maker.
The creators of TexturePacker has also created the application PhysicsEditor (Windows, Mac) which can be used to create vertices from sprites. The vertices can be exported as Box2D vertices and to game frameworks including Cocos2d and Corona (currently, there are no libgdx exporting feature. However, it is possible to export the vertices as plain text which you then can apply to a Box2D body from within libgdx).
Both of these applications are recommendable and make a game project, whichever framework you use.

Comments

Android Game Developers

Mon, 11/21/2011 - 12:07

i came across your article it is a valuable source for beginners thanks for sharing...

Anh Trung

Sun, 12/11/2011 - 12:09

VERY HELPFULL FOR ERVERYONE

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