Mr. Nom Invades Android - Beginning Android Games - page 234

Chapter 6
Mr. Nom Invades Android
In Chapter 3, we churned out a full design for Mr. Nom, consisting of the game mechanics,
a simple background story, handcrafted graphical assets, and definitions for all the screens
based on some paper cutouts. In Chapter 5, we developed a full-fledged game-development
framework that allows us to transfer our design screens easily to code. But enough talking; let's
start writing our first game!
Creating the Assets
We have two types of assets in Mr. Nom: audio assets and graphical assets. We recorded the
audio assets via a nice open source application called Audacity and a bad netbook microphone.
We created a sound effect to be played when a button is pressed or a menu item is chosen, one
for when Mr. Nom eats a stain, and one for when he eats himself. We saved them as OGGs to
the assets/ folder, under the names click.ogg , eat.ogg , and bitten.ogg , respectively. You can
either be creative and create those files yourself using Audacity and a microphone, or you can
fetch them from the SVN repository at http://code.google.com/p/beginnginandroidgames2/ .
See the front matter where we describe how to get the source code if you are unfamiliar with SVN.
Earlier, we mentioned that we'll want to reuse those paper cutouts from the design phase as our
real game graphics. For this, we first have to make them fit with our target resolution.
We chose a fixed target resolution of 320 × 480 (portrait mode) for which we'll design all our
graphic assets. This might seem small, but it made it very quick and easy for us to develop the
game and graphics and, after all, the point here is that you get to see the entire Android game
development process.
For your production game, consider all of the resolutions and use higher-resolution graphics so
that your game looks good on tablet-sized screens, perhaps targeting 800 × 1280 as a baseline.
We scanned in all the paper cutouts and resized them a bit. We saved most of the assets in
separate files and merged some of them into a single file. All images are saved in a PNG format.
The background is the only image that is RGB888; all others are ARGB8888. Figure 6-1 shows
you what we ended up with.
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