How it started
In the first half of 2010, I started to learn about Game Development in Android. Mainly because I love games and also because it seems to be easier to make money with them than with ‘normal’ Android apps.
That’s why I started to implement my first 2D Android Game. I did this using canvas, which means using Bitmaps, points, lines, circles and squares and drawing them onto the screen. By doing this drawings in a fast sequence (at least 24 per second) and by changing the position of certain painted objects, the user gets the illusion of moving objects.
In May, while being on the Droidcon 2010 in Berlin, a fellow developer, Nicolas Gramlich, the creator of anddev.org, told us about his new, OpenGL ES based, 2D game engine, andengine, for Android which he was writing for his bachelor thesis. Fascinated by the opportunities andengine offers, I decided to dig deeper into this (and canceled my still unfinished canvas-based game).
Shortly after that, I found a tutorial by Mario Zechner in which he explained the basics of OpenGL ES and wrote an example app, a Space Invaders clone in 3D.
The tutorial is a good entry point for 3D game development and can be recommended in many points.
Although Mario’s game had almost no menu and had no separate threads for the games logic and rendering, this was probably because he intended to write a tutorial, not a book. The tutorial is in German language, but a English translation can be found in the tutorial’s repository.
You probably already discovered it: Mario’s tutorial offered the basic idea for Space Invaders 3D and a lot of knowledge to get started.
At the moment the game offers:
- A ‘classical’ mode in different difficulty levels
- Four different types of ships with different powers
- Eight Different special weapons
- A ‘Galaxy Defense’ mode in which you have to defend different planets
- Several cool effects, such as start and game over animations and animated backgrounds
- Global high scores
- Performance settings
- many more
The game will be released this year. So stay tuned for more updates.
