Book Review
Beginning Android Games
Title: Beginning Android Games
Author: Mario Zechner
Publisher: Apress
ISBN: 978-1-4302-3042-7
The book starts out getting you set up to use the Android development environment, it then takes a step back before jumping into coding. Explaining the different types of games you could consider developing and another import part of game programming or any UI driven programming for that matter, which is what I call Story Boarding, basically laying out the screens and the flow of your application. Once you’ve got an idea what you’re trying to achieve the book than goes on to explain how you’re going to achieve it, first introducing some of the fundamentals of the Android platform and the game development framework, then going on to explain OpenGL 2D and 3D gradually increasing the complexity as the book goes on but also presenting some tricks you can use to facilitate your task. Finally the book explains how to go about publishing your game and other aspects you could consider exploring to further improve your game.
The book takes you from beginner through to some advanced topics and would therefore also be of interest to both beginners and seasoned developers from other areas of programming.
The book is well structured, introducing fundamental concepts and methods clearly and the authors use of examples makes the book easy to read and understand. Now all that’s left is finding the inspiration for that explosive game idea.