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AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook
AndEngine is a simple but powerful 2D game engine that’s ideal for developers who want to create mobile games. This cookbook will get you up to speed with the latest features and techniques quickly and practically. Overview In Detail AndEngine is a broad 2D game engine which allows game developers, both experienced and inexperienced, to develop games for the Android platform with ease. Don't be fooled by the simplicity, though. As easy as it is to "pick up and go," AndEngine includes enough functionality to bring any type of 2D game world to life. The "AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook" contains all of the necessary information and examples in order to build the games as you imagine them. The book's recipes will walk you through the various aspects of game design with AndEngine and provides detailed instructions on how to achieve some of the most desirable effects for your games. The "AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook" begins with detailed information on some of the more useful structuring techniques in game design and general aspects of resource management. Continuing on, the book will begin to discuss AndEngine entities, including sprites, text, meshes, and more. Everything from positioning, to modifiers, and even tips on improving entity functionality with raw OpenGL capabilities. From here on, everything from applying physics to your game, working with multi-touch events and gestures, game optimization, and even an overview of the various AndEngine extensions will be covered. The book has a widerange of recipes, from saving and loading game data, applying parallax backgrounds to create a seemingly 3D world, relying on touch events to zoom the game camera, taking screen-shots of the device's screen, and performance optimization using object pools. If physics-based games are more interesting to you, there's also a list of recipes ranging from controlling the world forces and calculating forces applied to bodies, creating destructible objects, and even creating rag-dolls. Pong styled games were fun 35 years ago, but it is time to take your game to the next level with the AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook. What you will learn from this book
380 pages, Paperback
First published October 22, 2012
31 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 5, 2013
Perfect way to get started in game development with AndEngine.
I really enjoyed this book because it appears to be helpful both to game developers who want to start using the AndEngine, as well as people that might be new to game development in general. Every cookbook "recipe" is something that you will need to use eventually while programming games, but it's laid out so if you are looking for a particular concept you can find it easily, or if you are a beginner to game development, you can read through the book from beginning to end, and get all the tools you will need to create pretty much any game, and get ideas on things that you can add, that you might have not otherwise thought of.
The author touches upon such a wealth of topics, from basic drawing, animated sprites, parallax backgrounds, box2d physics(with many examples), menu systems, and so much more, which makes this book valuable for the solutions that can be applied to other gaming frameworks you chose to use in the future.
The author even includes the source code for a fully professional quality game, and references which recipes were used to create each portion of it!
If you are interested in developing games using AndEngine, this is a great place to start. If you want a book that will stay a valuable reference in your library as you continue down the path of game development, get this book.
I really enjoyed this book because it appears to be helpful both to game developers who want to start using the AndEngine, as well as people that might be new to game development in general. Every cookbook "recipe" is something that you will need to use eventually while programming games, but it's laid out so if you are looking for a particular concept you can find it easily, or if you are a beginner to game development, you can read through the book from beginning to end, and get all the tools you will need to create pretty much any game, and get ideas on things that you can add, that you might have not otherwise thought of.
The author touches upon such a wealth of topics, from basic drawing, animated sprites, parallax backgrounds, box2d physics(with many examples), menu systems, and so much more, which makes this book valuable for the solutions that can be applied to other gaming frameworks you chose to use in the future.
The author even includes the source code for a fully professional quality game, and references which recipes were used to create each portion of it!
If you are interested in developing games using AndEngine, this is a great place to start. If you want a book that will stay a valuable reference in your library as you continue down the path of game development, get this book.
March 6, 2013
A few weeks ago, I got my hands on a copy of this book and as I have already been working on my first AndEngine game for a few months I hoped to get good pointers from this book.
Note that the book is dedicated only to the branch Anchor Center GLES 2 of AndEngine. For those still in GLES 1, this could be a good starting point to migrate.
The nice point of this book is that each recipe comes with bundles of code with explanations on how to do this or that. One small drawback is that the authors focus quickly on real game development and thus I would recommend first to get your hands dirty with some AndEngine tutorials for a few hours before hoping to get the best from this book. It is not a beginner book, even if you can grasp almost everything without knowing much about AndEngine.
For those who might have dwelled a bit in the realms of AndEngine, the name of Jayme (the main author) should be familiar as he is quite active on the forums and community.
The book is full of small tips about performances, how tos and good pratices, and it is really the first time I found myself taking notes while reading a book. Mainly due to the fact that there was so much good stuff to memorize.
As you probably got it, I loved this book and I do recommend it to anyone who is hoping to get a firm understanding of AndEngine while developping a properly organized application. It's quite difficult to put every cool thing of this book in this comment, so I invite you to read my full review on this blog post (in french sorry).
Ah! And If you still have some doubts about the usefullness of this book, you should go download the first chapter on Packtpub website for FREE!
Note that the book is dedicated only to the branch Anchor Center GLES 2 of AndEngine. For those still in GLES 1, this could be a good starting point to migrate.
The nice point of this book is that each recipe comes with bundles of code with explanations on how to do this or that. One small drawback is that the authors focus quickly on real game development and thus I would recommend first to get your hands dirty with some AndEngine tutorials for a few hours before hoping to get the best from this book. It is not a beginner book, even if you can grasp almost everything without knowing much about AndEngine.
For those who might have dwelled a bit in the realms of AndEngine, the name of Jayme (the main author) should be familiar as he is quite active on the forums and community.
The book is full of small tips about performances, how tos and good pratices, and it is really the first time I found myself taking notes while reading a book. Mainly due to the fact that there was so much good stuff to memorize.
As you probably got it, I loved this book and I do recommend it to anyone who is hoping to get a firm understanding of AndEngine while developping a properly organized application. It's quite difficult to put every cool thing of this book in this comment, so I invite you to read my full review on this blog post (in french sorry).
Ah! And If you still have some doubts about the usefullness of this book, you should go download the first chapter on Packtpub website for FREE!
August 10, 2016
This book is a very rare thing in the rapidly developing world of technology. It succinctly captures the major pitfalls, tips, and tricks of a developing engine without going into too much detail that would cause an otherwise useful book to become totally obsolete in 6 months. I really enjoyed reading this book having had no prior experience to AndEngine but a ton of Android coding experience. Here are my Pros/Cons:
Pros:
1) Really well written, you can tell the editor did their job
2) A decent layout, pretty easy to find what you are looking for
3) The kindle version formatted extremely well for my multiple devices
4) Code examples were thorough enough to be understood without pages of unnecessary code
5) I could easily develop my own AndEngine game after reading this book
Cons:
1) Some code was hard to follow or poorly written (as in I wouldn't have structured it the way they did)
2) There was no recipe detailing how to load entities or other objects from XML files. This is crucial for larger games with a lot of assets to not have to load everything with hard coded statements. Reusability in general was not considered in this book at all.
3) There could definitely have been more image demonstrating scope and end-result.
Notes:
1) Don't even think about it unless you are experience with Android programming. YOU WILL GET IN TROUBLE! This book does not go into any detail of how to setup an Android project, IDE, basic API calls, etc. Go elsewhere for that.
If you are on the fence, buy the book. It was a good read and I am happy to have spent the time on it.
Pros:
1) Really well written, you can tell the editor did their job
2) A decent layout, pretty easy to find what you are looking for
3) The kindle version formatted extremely well for my multiple devices
4) Code examples were thorough enough to be understood without pages of unnecessary code
5) I could easily develop my own AndEngine game after reading this book
Cons:
1) Some code was hard to follow or poorly written (as in I wouldn't have structured it the way they did)
2) There was no recipe detailing how to load entities or other objects from XML files. This is crucial for larger games with a lot of assets to not have to load everything with hard coded statements. Reusability in general was not considered in this book at all.
3) There could definitely have been more image demonstrating scope and end-result.
Notes:
1) Don't even think about it unless you are experience with Android programming. YOU WILL GET IN TROUBLE! This book does not go into any detail of how to setup an Android project, IDE, basic API calls, etc. Go elsewhere for that.
If you are on the fence, buy the book. It was a good read and I am happy to have spent the time on it.
February 25, 2013
One nice aspect of this AndEngine book is how it emphasises a rapid game production made possible by the engine's features. However it definitely is not meant for the newly fledged programmer. The text dives right into how you can set up the source code for a typical game. You already need to be familiar with the concept of callbacks. The authors do not waste your time in explaining at such low levels.
The first chapter furnishes a good overview of the many portions of a game and what these entail. You also need to pay attention to the asynchronous nature of AndEngine. It has several threads running simultaneously and the interactions between these can sometimes be intricate to debug.
Another important part of AndEngine is the means to customise many aspects. Each game strives to be unique, after all. So think of AndEngine as the internal framework, invisible to the player.
You should also be aware of various common design patterns before opening this book. It discusses some, like object factories and singletons. I suppose the concepts of the patterns in the book are straightforward enough, but prior exposure will make reading smoother.
For audio, the book explains how AndEngine usefully distinguishes between what it terms Sound classes and Music classes. The former are for short duration sounds, while the latter are for longer stretches of background or theme music. Programmers who know java and who have used java's sound classes will find much common ground here.
The first chapter furnishes a good overview of the many portions of a game and what these entail. You also need to pay attention to the asynchronous nature of AndEngine. It has several threads running simultaneously and the interactions between these can sometimes be intricate to debug.
Another important part of AndEngine is the means to customise many aspects. Each game strives to be unique, after all. So think of AndEngine as the internal framework, invisible to the player.
You should also be aware of various common design patterns before opening this book. It discusses some, like object factories and singletons. I suppose the concepts of the patterns in the book are straightforward enough, but prior exposure will make reading smoother.
For audio, the book explains how AndEngine usefully distinguishes between what it terms Sound classes and Music classes. The former are for short duration sounds, while the latter are for longer stretches of background or theme music. Programmers who know java and who have used java's sound classes will find much common ground here.
February 27, 2013
There's no easier book for learning the AndEngine for Android Game Development. The very experienced authors, Jayme Schroeder and Brian Broyles, tell everything very clear what you need to know about the AndEngine. In every chapter you learn something new about the AndEngine and at the end of the book, you can make your very own game! And besides, the writing style is very pleasant. Every chapter is composed of the same elements:, 'getting ready' (tells you what you need to know), 'how to do it' (tells you what you have to do), 'how it works' (this explaines what you just have done en what the code means) and 'there's more' (for if you want to learn more about the thing you've just done). This book is an high effective method if you want to learn the AndEngine very quickly.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews