Sunday, May 20, 2012

Be a game programmer they said

Be a games programmer they said. It's going to be fun they said.

Making games from scratch 10 years ago was hard. Try reading Tricks of the 3D Game Programming Gurus-Advanced 3D Graphics and Rasterization by Andrew LaMothe. The Math alone will make you cry, I did. I thought making a game for Android will be equally as hard. Glad to know there's AndEngine.

AndEngine is a framework for building games on the Android platform. It provides a lot of abstractions so as a programmer you don't have to deal with the low-level details. I particularly like the AndEngine physics extension - rolling your own physics engine is no walk in the park.

A few pointers on getting started with AndEngine:

1. You'll need an actual phone for this. The AndEngine examples can't run on the virtual devices since they can't support the OpenGL stuff.
2. AndEngine is designed for 2D not 3D.
3. As for the turtorial, when done you will get errors. Don't just give up, troubleshoot it. Giving up? What's the fun in that?
4. AndEngine is open-source.

Now, what game should I be making? Any suggestions?


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