Beginning Android Games [Tapa blanda]

This book has done a great job getting me up to speed on what I needed to know in order to port my old C DirectX 3 game over to the Android platform. The book quickly introduces you to the concepts you'll need to understand in order to get user input from the device, play sounds, load resources and ultimately render them on the screen.

While the author does a solid job introducing some basic physics and collision detection, don't expect to find the information you'll need to know in order to implement any sort of artificial intelligence or network play. In my opinion that's just fine, this is a beginner's book after all.

The author's framework does a nice job making getting input from the touch screen, accelerometer, and keyboard a simple task. I don't entirely agree with some of the design decisions the author makes, but that could be due to my C/C++ vs. Java background.

As far as rendering goes, first you'll take the easy approach using Android's custom drawing API. If your game is simple enough, this may be all you need. As the book progresses you'll swap out the original renderer with one based on OpenGL ES. Although the author does a very good job covering OpenGL, keep in mind that you'll be developing 2D games and not 3D games.

There are three chapters at the end of the book that will teach you the basics of 3D games programming. You'll learn some basic concepts, how to get 3D models onto the screen, and how to do basic collision detection in 3D. However, I feel that the leap from the material in the book to an actual 3D game is fairly significant. Don't expect to finish this book and then go code the best FPS any mobile platform has ever seen.

All-in-all, I'm pretty happy with this book.

I'm a 6-game and multiple app veteran of Android development. I completely agree with the approach this book takes to Android game development. Mario takes the developer through a step-by-step process in assembling a light but high quality game that isn't just the "Android" way but is the way many portable titles are built out. I also like the fact that multiple examples are given and fully functional source code to the projects.

Very good job, Mr Zechner! If you're new to Android game development, this is a great way to start.

The words on the book "Get started with game apps development for the Android platform" is misleading because the book does not cover the Android API. I checked the forum on the author's site and found out that the reason for not covering the Android API is that this API is not platform independent. So why the words "Android platform" on the book? Shouldn't the cover simply state "Creating a Java framework for beginning Android Games" because that's what the book is about.

Later, in the book, I read that he wanted to make things easier by not covering the Android API. But it is truly easier to learn how to do things the correct way than to learn the "easier" way and have to relearn everything. Plus, this book is listed second in Apress's Android book series, right after the beginning Android book; so one should already have some knowledge of the Android API before ready this book.

In reality, the book is a precursor to the open source Java-based game development framework libgdx, which the author developed. This framework works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, as well as Android. Thus, the reason for the code not being platform dependent and, therefore, not using the Android API. The book should not be sold as an Android book. It is a Java framework that just happens to work on the Android. This does not mean it is the best way to write code if you are creating your games solely for Android devices. Otherwise, why even bother to develop the Android API?

As a book that provides a Java framework for creating games for Android mobile phones, the book is excellent. The author's framework provides a very organized structure for creating games.

However, there will be issues that will crop up if you use his framework without the Android API. For this reason, I am now in the process of modifying the code to use the Android API, at first I subtracted one star, giving the book four stars instead of five, for that. But after reading Chapter 6 and realizing just how uncompilable his code is to the Android way of doing things, I've subtracted two stars.