Android NDK Game Development Cookbook

Over 70 exciting recipes to help you develop mobile games for Android in C++

Overview

• Tips and tricks for developing and debugging mobile games on your desktop
• Enhance your applications by writing multithreaded code for audio playback, network access, and asynchronous resource loading
• Enhance your game development skills by using modern OpenGL ES and develop applications without using an IDE
• Features two ready-to-run Android games

In Detail

Android NDK is used for multimedia applications which require direct access to a system’s resources. Android NDK is also the key for portability, which in turn provides a reasonably comfortable development and debugging process using familiar tools such as GCC and Clang toolchains. If your wish to build Android games using this amazing framework, then this book is a must-have.

This book provides you with a number of clear step-by-step recipes which will help you to start developing mobile games with Android NDK and boost your productivity debugging them on your computer. This book will also provide you with new ways of working as well as some useful tips and tricks that will demonstrably increase your development speed and efficiency.

This book will take you through a number of easy-to-follow recipes that will help you to take advantage of the Android NDK as well as some popular C++ libraries. It presents Android application development in C++ and shows you how to create a complete gaming application.

You will learn how to write portable multithreaded C++ code, use HTTP networking, play audio files, use OpenGL ES, to render high-quality text, and how to recognize user gestures on multi-touch devices. If you want to leverage your C++ skills in mobile development and add performance to your Android applications, then this is the book for you.

What you will learn from this book

• Port popular C++ libraries to Android
• Write portable multithreaded code
• Play audio with OpenAL
• Implement gesture recognition
• Render text with FreeType
• Use OpenGL ES to port and abstract APIs from the game code to develop games on a desktop PC
• Debug mobile applications on your desktop
• Access Flickr and Picasa web services from C++
• Extract resources from APK archives
• Develop Android applications without an IDE

Approach

A systematic guide consisting of over 70 recipes which focus on helping you build portable mobile games and aims to enhance your game development skills with clear instructions.

Who this book is written for

If you are a C++ developer who wants to jump into the world of Android game development and who wants to use the power of existing C++ libraries in your existing Android Java applications, then this book is for you. You need to have basic knowledge of C or C++ including pointer manipulation, multithreading, and object-oriented programming concepts as well as some experience developing applications without using an IDE.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Establishing a Build Environment
Chapter 2: Porting Common Libraries
Chapter 3: Networking
Chapter 4: Organizing a Virtual Filesystem
Chapter 5: Cross-platform Audio Streaming
Chapter 6: Unifying OpenGL ES 3 and OpenGL 3
Chapter 7: Cross-platform UI and Input Systems
Chapter 8: Writing a Match-3 Game
Chapter 9: Writing a Picture Puzzle Game