Learning Android Game Programming: A Hands-On Guide to Writing Your First Android Game, Rough Cuts

Description

This is the Rough Cut version of the printed book.

Learning Android Game Programming is your hands-on, start-to-finish guide to creating winning games for today’s rapidly growing Android mobile device marketplace. If you have even basic Android development experience, Rick Rogers will help you build on your knowledge to quickly create low-budget 2D mobile games that sell.

The book starts with an up-to-the-minute overview of today’s Android mobile games marketplace, reviews each leading genre, and teaches you the foundational concepts of game development. You’ll design a simple game, then master every step of game development with AndEngine—the powerful, open source, free game-development engine. Every chapter teaches with sample code you can actually use, including many examples drawn from the published game, Virgins Versus Vampires (V3).

With this book you’ll learn how to 

• Use free Android tools for creating code, artwork, and sound
• Implement the “game loop” that is at the heart of Android games
• Bring your game to life with scene transitions and entity modifiers
• Make the most of bitmap and vector graphics, sprites, and animation
• Integrate user input via touch, multitouch, keyboard, voice recognition, accelerometer, location, and compass
• Build infinite virtual worlds with tile maps
• Create, save, and reuse powerful particle effects
• Find, acquire, modify, and use background music and sound effects
• Implement highly realistic physics effects with Box2D
• Use AI techniques to make your games smarter and more fun
• Build a scoring framework based on collisions between your game elements

Download the free version of Virgins Versus Vampires (V3) from Android Market today, as you learn how to build the game in this book

Sample Content

Table of Contents

Foreword xix

The Mobile Game Market 1

The World of Computer Games 2

AndEngine Examples 10

Summary 12

Exercises 12

Software Development Tools 15

Graphics Tools 20

Audio Tools 24

Getting Our Feet Wet: The Splash Screen 26

Summary 31

Exercises 32

Game Loops in General 33

The Game Loop in AndEngine 34

Adding a Menu Screen to V3 37

Memory Usage 50

The Quit Option 51

Summary 51

Exercises 52

Scenes in AndEngine 53

Creating the Game Level 1 Scene 79

Summary 85

Exercises 85

Quick Look Back at Entity 87

Drawing Lines and Rectangles 88

Sprites 89

Summary 106

Exercises 107

Requirements for Animation 109

Animation Tiled Textures 110

Animation in AndEngine 111

Animation Example 113

Adding Animation to Level1Activity 118

Animation Problems 126

Advanced Topic: 2D Animations from 3D Models 127

Summary 127

Exercises 128

Fonts and Typefaces 129

Loading Fonts 130

Text in AndEngine 133

Custom Fonts 137

Adding Custom Fonts to V3 139

Summary 146

Exercises 146

Android and AndEngine Input Methods 149

Adding User Input to V3 167

Summary 171

Exercises 172

Why Tile Maps? 173

Types of Tile Maps 173

Structure of Tile Maps 176

Tile Maps in AndEngine 176

The Tile Editor: Tiled 179

TMX Files 180

Orthogonal Game: Whack-A-Vampire 181

Isometric Tile Maps 196

Summary 197

Exercises 197