Game Dev for Google Android

[Markbnj]

As the title says, an interesting blog post on what you need to get started developing games for the Android mobile platform. I use Eclipse already, and have downloaded the SDK. At least thinking about messing with it.

http://www.rbgrn.net/blog/2008...-game-development.html

 

[Crusty]

Nice info there, I'm definitely going to play around with it. Just waiting for everything to install, I haven't touched Java in a year or so :Q

 

[Markbnj]

I've been messing with it a little this afternoon. It was very easy to set up, since I am already familiar with Eclipse. I didn't have the JDK on this system, so I installed 6 update 10, and Eclipse Ganymede, and then the android SDK 1.0. The only setup necessary was to add the path to the tools dir to my environment vars.

The emulator and eclipse plug-in seem to work well, although there have been some changes since the beta and the docs haven't kept up in all cases. The emulator took forever to compile everything the first time I ran it, but is seems to work well enough now. Start-up time is about 20 seconds or so.

I've messed around with Windows mobile before, but never really came up with a killer idea. The question for me is whether Android is worth learning? Is it going to be successful enough to spawn a significant market?

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

Originally posted by: Markbnj
I've messed around with Windows mobile before, but never really came up with a killer idea. The question for me is whether Android is worth learning? Is it going to be successful enough to spawn a significant market?

The G1 had 1.5 million pre-orders. I'm not sure what sales are looking like now, but I would say there's a good chance of success. However, how many people will people be willing to pay for Android apps? I see this OS being popular among the OSS crowd, meaning it might be difficult to sell apps when there is an abundance of free software available. I don't know if this will happen or not.

 

[Markbnj]

Good point, but "pay" can take many forms, and the revenue from, say, a social networking application, or a local restaurant opinion-sharing app, could be indirect.

But really this is just for fun at the moment. I always like playing with these sandbox environments. It's a nice antidote to the complexity of desktop app or web app development these days. If I wrote something a few thousand people used for free, that would also be cool.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

In that case I absolutely believe that developing on the Android platform would be suitable. The G1 is just a taste of what the platform will offer - it's essentially a beta model. I have little doubt that Android will become very popular.