Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter
1
An Android in Every Home
As kids of the eighties and nineties, we naturally grew up with our trusty Nintendo Game Boys
and Sega Game Gears. We spent countless hours helping Mario rescue the princess, getting the
highest score in Tetris, and racing our friends in Super RC Pro-Am via Link Cable. We took these
awesome pieces of hardware with us everywhere we could. Our passion for games made us
want to create our own worlds and share them with our friends. We started programming on the
PC, but soon realized that we couldn't transfer our little masterpieces to the available portable
game consoles. As we continued being enthusiastic programmers, over time our interest in
actually playing video games faded. Besides, our Game Boys eventually broke . . .
Fast forward to today. Smartphones and tablets have become the new mobile gaming platforms
of this era, competing with classic, dedicated handheld systems such as the Nintendo 3DS
and the PlayStation Vita. This development renewed our interest, and we started investigating
which mobile platforms would be suitable for our development needs. Apple's iOS seemed like
a good candidate for our game coding skills. However, we quickly realized that the system was
not open, that we'd be able to share our work with others only if Apple allowed it, and that we'd
need a Mac in order to develop for the iOS. And then we found Android.
We both immediately fell in love with Android. Its development environment works on all the
major platforms—no strings attached. It has a vibrant developer community, happy to help you
with any problem you encounter, as well as offering comprehensive documentation. You can
share your games with anyone without having to pay a fee to do so, and if you want to monetize
your work, you can easily publish your latest and greatest innovation to a global market with
millions of users in a matter of minutes.
The only thing left was to figure out how to write games for Android, and how to transfer our PC
game development knowledge to this new system. In the following chapters, we want to share
our experience with you and get you started with Android game development. Of course, this is
partly a selfish plan: we want to have more games to play on the go!
Let's start by getting to know our new friend, Android.
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