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Preface

Android is the fastest growing operating system, and Android devices can empower, entertain, and educate the planet. Android uses one of the most popular programming languages—Java, which is a high-performance, secure, and object-oriented language.

It is the most widespread Operating System and games are what people spend most time using on their phones. Video games have never been easier to make and distribute. Who would not want to make games for Android? And on top of this, making games is fun, addictive, and very rewarding; it can be hard to stop once you get started.

The problem comes when we reach a stumbling block because we don't know how to implement a feature, or perhaps integrate it into our game. This course will help you build simple as well as complex games from scratch using the Android SDK and all your queries and obstacles will be addressed in this journey.

Let's get rolling!

What this learning path covers

Module 1, 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

Module 2, 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.

Module 3, 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.

What you need for this learning path

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:

Microsoft Windows 8/7/Vista/2003 (32 or 64-bit)
GB RAM minimum, 4 GB RAM recommended
400 MB hard disk space
At least 1 GB for Android SDK, emulator system images, and caches
1280 x 800 minimum screen resolution
Java Development Kit (JDK) 7
Optional for accelerated emulator: Intel processor with support for Intel VTx, Intel EM64T (Intel 64), and Execute Disable (XD) Bit functionality

For Mac OS X:

Mac OS X 10.8.5 or higher, up to 10.9 (Mavericks)
2 GB RAM minimum, 4 GB RAM recommended
400 MB hard disk space
At least 1 GB for Android SDK, emulator system images, and caches
1280 x 800 minimum screen resolution
Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6
Java Development Kit (JDK) 7
Optional for accelerated emulator: Intel processor with support for Intel VTx, Intel EM64T (Intel 64), and Execute Disable (XD) Bit functionality

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:

GNOME or KDE desktop
GNU C Library (glibc) 2.15 or later
2 GB RAM minimum, 4 GB RAM recommended
400 MB hard disk space
At least 1 GB for Android SDK, emulator system images, and caches
1280 x 800 minimum screen resolution
Oracle Java Development Kit (JDK) 7

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

Who this learning path is for

If you are completely new to any one of Java, Android, or game programming, this book is for you. If you want to publish Android games for fun or for business and are not sure where to start, then this book will show you what to do, step by step from the start.

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