Chapter 1
Android, the New Kid on the Block
As kids of the early 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 2011. Smartphones have become the new mobile gaming platforms of this era, competing with classic, dedicated handheld systems such as the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation PSP. 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 immediately fell in love. Android's 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!