Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter
16
What's Next?
We talked about a ton of stuff in this topic, but there's still so much more to learn about
developing Android games. If you feel comfortable with all of the material you've read in this
book, you'll probably want to dig deeper. This brief chapter provides some ideas and directions
for your journey.
Location Awareness
We only briefly touched on this in Chapters 1 and 4, and we didn't exploit it in any of our games.
All Android devices come with some type of sensor that lets you determine their location. An
interesting enough feature in itself, using it in a game can make for some innovative and never-
before-seen game mechanics. Most Android games hardly use this capability. Can you think of a
fun way to use the GPS sensor in your game?
Multiplayer Functionality
This being a beginner's book, we haven't talked about how to create multiplayer games. Suffice
it to say that Android provides you with the APIs to do just that. Depending on the type of game,
the difficulty of implementing multiplayer functionality varies. Turn-based games, such as chess
or card games, are pretty simple to implement. Fast-paced action games or real-time strategy
games are a different matter altogether. In both cases, you need to have an understanding of
network programming, a topic for which a lot of materials exist on the Web.
OpenGL ES 2.0/3.0 and More
So far, you've seen only half of OpenGL ES, so to speak. We used OpenGL ES 1.0 exclusively,
because it is the most widely supported version on Android at this point. Its fixed-function nature
lends itself well to getting into 3D graphics programming. However, there's a newer, shinier
version of OpenGL ES that enables you to code directly on the GPU. It's very different from
what you have seen in this topic in that you are responsible for all the nitty-gritty details, such
as fetching a single texel from a texture or manually transforming the coordinates of a vertex, all
directly on the GPU.
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