Welcome to Android Gaming

Abstract

Welcome to the world of Android Games! The goal of this book is to help you build the best games for the platform. As you work your way through the chapters, you will learn how to create two kinds of games: pure Java, and perhaps most interestingly, hybrid games that combine the elegant design of Java with the raw power of C for maximum performance. The ability to combine both Java and C in this way is what makes the games in this book unique, as Google does not support this kind of development. But you may ask, “Why even bother with hybrid games?” After all, Java provides all the APIs you need to build any kind of game. This is certainly true. However, there are thousands of games out there written in C that can be brought to Android by compiling the C core and wrapping a Java graphical user interface (GUI) using the Java Native Interface (JNI). In this book, you’ll learn how to bring to the platform two of the great 3D shooter games for the PC: Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.