Mastering Android Game Development

• Develop complex Android games from scratch
• Learn the internals of a game engine by building one
• A succinct, hands-on guide to enhance your game development skills with Android SDK

• Understand the internals of a game engine and the reasoning behind each of the components
• Decide when to use each of the different ways of drawing on Android
• Handle user inputs, from virtual joysticks to gamepads
• Implement collision detection using different techniques and discover how to optimize it for complex games
• Use animations and particle systems to provide a rich experience
• Create beautiful, responsive, and reusable UIs by taking advantage of the Android SDK
• Integrate Google Play Services to provide achievements and leaderboards to the players

Gaming has historically been a strong driver of technology, whether we're talking about hardware or software performance, the variety of input methods, or graphics support, and the Android game platform is no different. Android is a mature, yet still growing, platform that many game developers have embraced as it provides tools, APIs, and services to help bootstrap Android projects and ensure their success, many of which are specially designed to help game developers.

This book is a progressive, hands-on guide to developing highly interactive and complex Android games from scratch. You will learn all the aspects of developing a game using a space shooter game as the example that will evolve with you through the chapters. You will learn all about frame-by-frame animations and resource animations. You will also create beautiful and responsive menus and dialogs and explore the different options for playing sound effects and music in Android.

You will then learn the basics of creating a particle system and how to use the Leonids library. Finally, we will configure and use Google Play Services on the developer console and port our game to the big screen.