Android NDK Game Development Cookbook

Over 70 exciting recipes to help you develop mobile games for Android in C++

Overview

Tips and tricks for developing and debugging mobile games on your desktop
Enhance your applications by writing multithreaded code for audio playback, network access, and asynchronous resource loading
Enhance your game development skills by using modern OpenGL ES and develop applications without using an IDE
Features two ready-to-run Android games
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

Port popular C++ libraries to Android
Write portable multithreaded code
Play audio with OpenAL
Implement gesture recognition
Render text with FreeType
Use OpenGL ES to port and abstract APIs from the game code to develop games on a desktop PC
Debug mobile applications on your desktop
Access Flickr and Picasa web services from C++
Extract resources from APK archives
Develop Android applications without an IDE
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.