Android NDK Game Development Cookbook

by Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov

For C++ developers, this is the book that can swiftly propel you into the potentially profitable world of Android games. The 70+ step-by-step recipes using Android NDK will give you the wide-ranging knowledge you need. Overview In Detail Android NDK is used for multimedia applications which require direct access to a system's resources. Android NDK is also the key for portability, which in turn provides a reasonably comfortable development and debugging process using familiar tools such as GCC and Clang toolchains. If your wish to build Android games using this amazing framework, then this book is a must-have. This book provides you with a number of clear step-by-step recipes which will help you to start developing mobile games with Android NDK and boost your productivity debugging them on your computer. This book will also provide you with new ways of working as well as some useful tips and tricks that will demonstrably increase your development speed and efficiency. This book will take you through a number of easy-to-follow recipes that will help you to take advantage of the Android NDK as well as some popular C++ libraries. It presents Android application development in C++ and shows you how to create a complete gaming application. You will learn how to write portable multithreaded C++ code, use HTTP networking, play audio files, use OpenGL ES, to render high-quality text, and how to recognize user gestures on multi-touch devices. If you want to leverage your C++ skills in mobile development and add performance to your Android applications, then this is the book for you. What you will learn from this book Approach A systematic guide consisting of over 70 recipes which focus on helping you build portable mobile games and aims to enhance your game development skills with clear instructions. Who this book is written for If you are a C++ developer who wants to jump into the world of Android game development and who wants to use the power of existing C++ libraries in your existing Android Java applications, then this book is for you. You need to have basic knowledge of C or C++ including pointer manipulation, multithreading, and object-oriented programming concepts as well as some experience developing applications without using an IDE.

320 pages, Paperback

First published November 25, 2013

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you’d like to try making games on Android using C++, or want to use a C++ library with your current game, this book would be very helpful for you. The last two chapters especially bring it all together, creating two simpler games, just to demonstrate all the basic techniques needed to make any game (A tetris type game, and a picture puzzle that fetches pictures from the internet, and creates a cool little 3d carousel to display them).

This book would be most helpful to someone who either has a C++ background, and wants to create Android games, while trying to avoid Java, or for a current Android Java programmer, who needs or wants higher performance for cpu intensive tasks. The target audience isn’t someone new to programming.
Don’t expect it to teach you C++, or in depth game programming, but it will teach you how to create a game using C++ on Android (and on desktop, which is much more time efficient to debug on, and can really help you get your games out faster). From there you could extrapolate, and use the techniques to create any kind of game you like.