Android Gaming Platform

I've personally never felt that 2D games were complex enough to warrant a "game engine" sort of project. At the most, a 2D box- or spring-physics library comes in handy, but definitely not needed in the majority of cases. As long as you can draw bitmap images with transparency keys, you really shouldn't need much more from the platform.

Mmm, Android is Java. The platform is Java. Java is already available as a platform. What exactly are you looking for?

I think he's looking for a game framework like Irrlicht or jMonkeyEngine.

I think a lightweight framework has its place in 2D development. It doesn't need to be anything complex, but it's nice to have some utilities for sprite animation, tiled background scrolling, value interpolation, and other boilerplate code already written. This stuff isn't hard to do yourself, but it's labor intensive and distracts you from the goal of completing your game.

EDIT: To answer the OP... No, I don't know of any framework. I've looked, too. You'll probably wind up writing your own.

Quote:

Original post by smr I think he's looking for a game framework like Irrlicht or jMonkeyEngine. I think a lightweight framework has its place in 2D development. It doesn't need to be anything complex, but it's nice to have some utilities for sprite animation, tiled background scrolling, value interpolation, and other boilerplate code already written. This stuff isn't hard to do yourself, but it's labor intensive and distracts you from the goal of completing your game.

Or Slick. This is exactly it. Why should I be writing my own collision detection, sprite animation, and side-scrolling algorithms when almost EVERYONE needs this kind of stuff and it, therefore, should already been written!

I wouldn't even have a problem helping port an existing one to Android...if there was an effort to do so.

The author of Slick did port it for a previous version of the Android SDK and had some working examples. I personally think Slick is over designed and is too restrictive as a result. I tried to use it for a java game but came into problems when it came to using the tile map loading and rendering. It made some assumptions that I couldn't get along with.

Would there be any interest in making our own then?

I based a lot of my work off of this:

http://www.anddev.org/droidgaming_-_an_easier_way_to_make_games-t3135.html

Perhaps we can use this as a base?

I'm not particularly interested. I have some boilerplate code written for 2D Java applications that could be ported pretty easily. It would take pretty minimal effort to translate to Android, as the only platform dependency is in a single class. The main issue would be performance. It isn't optimized at all. It's pretty reckless with memory, doesn't avoid boxing/unboxing overhead, and doesn't avoid floating point math. It performs well on typical hardware. On a handheld with no FPU, relatively slow processor and restricted memory it would probably be dog-slow.