Do you remember landmark games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Asteroids? Well, heres an exciting opportunity to build and/or port these games to one of the hottest mobile and netbooks platforms today: Googles Android.

Pro Android Games teaches you how to build cool games like Space Blaster and the classic Asteroids from scratch on the latest Android platform. This book also shows you how to port other classic freeware/shareware games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D from C using the Java Native Interface (JNI) for Android.

This book is all about a unique perspective in Android game development: a well-balanced, powerful combination of pure Java and hybrid game development, mixing Java and C. By combining the elegant object-oriented features of Java and the raw power of C, there is no limit to the types of games that you can build for the platform. With actionable real-world source code in hand, this book allows you to dive right into games development on Android. Youll definitely have fun, and perhaps youll even make some money. Enjoy!

What youll learn

• How to write/port advanced 3D games for any Android device.
• How to setup a Linux system for hybrid game compilation.
• How to combine Java and C code in an elegant manner by building a simple Java application on top of a native library.
• How to tackle pure Java gaming with two practical games: Space Blaster and the arcade classic Asteroids.
• How to mix OpenGL API calls in Java and C for high performance 3D graphics using the 3D cubes sample by Google.
• How to bring two of the greatest PC 3D shooters to the Android platform: Wolfenstein 3D and Doom using Java and C.

Who this book is for


This book is for Google Android developers interested in game application development in Java or porting existing C-based games via JNI into Android and developing/deploying from there. It is targeted to developers who already know such basics of Android development as activity, view, and layout. Additionally, it assumes that you are a seasoned game developer in Java and C, and have a basic knowledge of Linux and Shell Scripting.

Table of Contents

1.  Welcome to Android Gaming
2.  Compiling Native Code in Android
3.  Building a Java Game from Scratch
4. Java Games Continued: Fun with Polygons
5.  Hybrid 3D Graphics with OpenGL and JNI
6. 3D Shooters Episode I: Wolfenstein 3D for Android
7. 3D Shooters Episode II: Doom for Android

 

Customer Reviews & Comments
This book will be obsolete ~6 months from now after the Android team removes its collective cranium from its collective digestive endpoint in response to the IPhone continuing to clobber it with better games despite the frustratingly unexposed hardware superiority of recent Android phones like the Droid and the Nexus One. And that time will be the moment they release the Android equivalent of DirectX. Interpreted Java without a JIT to back it up crossed with some very limited media APIs just isn't enough to compete with compiled C and a much more robust media API on the IPhone. And I apologize for the short editorial, but I need it to set the stage for why you should indeed buy this book even though it will soon be irrelevant. For if you need to write native-level games now, this is the book to buy, now. It's full of typos, it needed another round of proofreading, and it's already dated somewhat by NDK 1.6, but it shows how to get games like Wolf3D and Doom running in C on the Android and it's in print rather than out there on a set of disparate web pages. There's nothing else out there like it at the moment. 5 stars for content as it really does deliver on the goods and 3 stars for coherency and lack of sufficient proofreading.

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