Learning android game programming a hands on guide to building your first android game
[...]... Computer Games People have been playing games on computers for almost as long as electronic computers have existed, and a rich variety of games has been invented In her book Reality Is Broken, Jane McGonigal says that most games have four attributes: A goal: Games clearly define a goal for the players to achieve It’s important that the goals be challenging, yet achievable Ideally, players are always playing... with easy challenges and gradually ramp up to higher challenges as their game- playing skills and experience improve Levels are a proven way to achieve this effect—the player learns how to play the game in the first few levels, and his or her skills have to continue to improve as new levels are presented This is also a great way to add some variety to the game Adversaries The adversaries in a game are... extensions that are available for AndEngine to perform tasks such as creating Android live w allpapers, playing MOD music files, creating augmented reality games, and communicating among players in multiplayer games Chapter 16, Game Integration, finishes off the example game by completing or adding features to make it playable Chapter 17, Testing and Publishing, describes what you need to do to ensure your. .. application is itself a game, we enjoy the process at multiple levels Come and play the software game, and develop that idea that’s been burning in the back of your mind all this time The Mobile Game Market Games are the killer applications for smartphones today According to one analyst,2 more than 23% of all mobile phone users older than 13 years of age in the United States play games on their phones—and... help on playing the game Make the game goals easy to understand Show game status clearly Mobile users typically play games in short sessions Players need to easily pause and resume a game, and the phone should be able to pause and resume games when necessary (e.g., for an incoming call) nn nn nn nn nn nn nn Players should be able to make game progress in a short period of time The World of Computer Games... resources to create a really snazzy 3D first- person shooter game like Halo, players are unlikely to sit with their smartphone and play it for hours the way they might with the XBox version Users are much more likely to play mobile games in short sessions, pausing and resuming the game perhaps days later Speaking of resources, what does it take to create a commercial game? A typical console game for a single... enjoyable Voluntary participation: It just isn’t a game unless you really want to play This aspect of games implies the players’ acceptance of the goal, rules, and feedback system nn nn nn nn Before we create a new game, we want to think about which types of games exist, as well as which types work well on mobile devices and which don’t We also want to take a look at the components that are common to all... Scenes, Layers, Transitions, and Modifiers, dives into graphics and uncovers the scene transitions and entity modifiers that AndEngine provides to make a game come alive Chapter 5, Drawing and Sprites, goes deeper into developing bitmap and vector graphics for your game, and shows you how to display sprites Chapter 6, Animation, introduces easy ways to build animated sprites for your game, and really get... phones—and that percentage is increasing, especially for the 60 million-plus smartphone users According to another analyst,3 65% of smartphone users have played a mobile game on their phones at some point Doing the math, that means approximately 40 million people today play games on their smartphones Creating mobile games can be a very profitable business It’s very difficult to p redict which games... up—3D artwork, motion capture, animation, game play, user testing, and software development are all both time consuming and expensive This book is about you and maybe one or two friends creating your own mobile game for the Android platform The Android SDK is free, and as of this writing, it costs only $25 to sign up for Android Market and sell your game to anyone with an Android device We’ll stick to . technology to whatever you are working on. Visit informit.com/learningseries for a complete list of available publications. Addison-Wesley Learning Series Learning Android Game Programming A Hands-On.