Project 1 - A Simple Android game

A week in and trawling through the documentation has been fun, if somewhat of a shotgun approach.

Have been reading a mix of Android, C++ and game programming information and decided to begin with a simple game written in Android with C++ added in later games where performance benefits from it.

As a source, Killer Game Programming has been useful to understand the basic structure of a game and give me some ideas that will allow me to develop a game quickly in Android from a Java basis.

The next few posts will be a walk through of my journey to develop my first game, a version of Snake Chase from Chapter 3 of Killer Game Programming in Java.

I know nothing

Despite being a hobbyist programmer for nearly 20 years now, I'm still a newb.

However like Sgt Schultz, despite my incompetence I still manage to get things done.

That's the way it will be with this blog too.

It seems to me that a lot of programming projects started by hobbyists fail, not because of technical challenges, but because people run out of motivation or become distracted by “more important” issues.

Luckily, focus and perseverance are qualities I have in abundance. So this blog is going to track my progress from C/C++/Android and game development newb to a commercially released game on the Android platform. In wanting to make the codebase portable to other platforms, I’m going to write a lot of the code in C++ (which I know very little about at this point) and link it into Android through the NDK.

So for those that eventually find this blog, I hope the information proves useful.