Learning Android Game Programming

Build the Next Great Android Game!

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

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Mobile Games
Chapter 2 Game Elements and Tools
Chapter 3 The Game Loop and Menus
Chapter 4 Scenes, Layers, Transitions, and Modifiers
Chapter 5 Drawing and Sprites
Chapter 6 Animation
Chapter 7 Text
Chapter 8 User Input
Chapter 9 Tile Maps
Chapter 10 Particle Systems
Chapter 11 Sound
Chapter 12 Physics
Chapter 13 Artificial Intelligence
Chapter 14 Scoring and Collisions
Chapter 15 Multimedia Extensions
Chapter 16 Game Integration
Chapter 17 Testing and Publishing

A: Exercise Solutions