As I am digging deeper into Android development, I decided to share some thoughts about it here.
1. Mobile games / Game development
For my point of view (developer and gamer) it is the most interesting part of Android market. I would really wish that more complex games would show up: point and click adventure, RPG or just some shooter with nice controls and graphics. Although I have to admit, many casual games are beautifully polished and they are just pleasure to play (Buka or Jewellust/Devilry Huntress).
I have already spent some time with SDK, and I am aware that writing complex, graphically demanding game is challenging on Android platform. First of all, main there is Java as main programming language. The old programming joke:
“Knock, knock”
“- who’s there?”
…very long pause…
“- Java”
may be funny, but when you write a game on such limited hardware, you suddenly bump into bottlenecks not encountered on other platforms. Excellent talk about Android game development can be found here:
Google I/O 2009 – Writing Real-Time Games for Android. It’s author, Chris Pruett, presents efficent game framework and different rendering methods (Canvas, OpenGL), which I adapted to use with my own project. On the other hand, Mystique is a 3D first person adventure game which overcame platform restrictions. I certainly hope that more games like Mystique would appear on Android market.
