Introduction to Designing Open Source Games for the Google Smart Phones

Google has offered the open source tools and the education but it is up to you to learn and develop your own apps for smart phones to prove how competent you are at developing and designing open source games and to what value you will be able to offer in future developments online. Google I imagine are a great company to work for and as big as they are with the smart phones they realise they do not have the time or resources to single handily develop new gaming software nor for that matter have the time to exactly mirror working documents for the hand-held phones, it’s just not plausible. However, they have reportedly come to some agreement with certain apps available for the Android, I suppose to challenge the growing presence of Apple’s power. So, with that in mind lets get into the details of online gaming design.

People who make games through Java script for mobile phones especially arcade games users of Java. Now Java has, like most software its own script, script means a language in which a program can understand if you do not have the right software or do not know which software to use, then refer to an expert, these gaming experts are called C++ Engineers because this is the type of language Java operates with. Those already experienced in the language of C++ can use Java, and Java is gaming industry standard, Java is also known for its Flash integration, audio software, texts and cloud based open source development. This is usually done in Linux rather than Unix and the imagery in these new media tools can be surprisingly refreshing. This has reduced the amount of work needed to learn these skills. Open software is a great place to start.

Before you design the game there are a few things you need to understand when designing games for the phone. Like an I-Pad and other touch screen devices the Teflon screen creates a motion and by controlling your game from the screen can alter the response time of your game, these have been my main concerns about games for the Android – they are clunky and the controls unless scroll button enabled are very annoying. Similarly the tilt sensor in the phone is very advanced. Learning how to program a game like this is well beyond the scope of this introductory post. All you need to know with these problems or if you wish to learn more about these high end problems of designing games for the Android phone are GLSurfaceView ATITC compression, VBO’s and there buffers (which are responsible and great for giving feedback when a game crashes because you can trackback the results of the crash when you report it to Google.

Some interesting terminology which will boost your understanding and help you educate yourself about games designing for Android phones are listed in this short glo2D side-scroller – Parallax layers, tile-based worlds, animated sprites the right hardware buttons: input systems, OpenGL, ES Writing Java code for Android phones.

Is this game for kids? If so make what’s known as the gaming objects so, is the game for adults, if yes then go ahead, add swear words and grotesque violence; but otherwise keep it simple, the best bet is to avoid anything like this because most smart phones are restricted and changing these restrictions can be as equally complicated as designing the games so please for the users avoid any adult content.

To understand the layers and graphics of any game you need to understand how the Architecture and layers of the game are made. On screen you have main loops. This is where the game has its main contents. Sub graphs are what the characters are in any game, these have to be designed beforehand and using the right software to improve the code of these moving images, especially if you wish to convey your games product originally and efficiently. A good place to start focusing on is the colours in the background of the game, as the games flash between screens you want these colours to have some sort of continuity in the way that the transitions occur.

The objects of any game will have to include the player integrated to control the game to give some sort of gravity to the game, this gives it a narrative and will make the game more interesting. How the characters or objects move in the game is very important. The crash icons are known as collision component, you will need to think carefully when making these and linking them with the size and appropriate colour of the destruction of each individual character. Then you must understand the physics of how these characters all blends. You can improve your animation skills by understanding the codes of Java and know about capabilities within these software companies that help you design your mobile phone game. The players in the game and the objectives of the game and how these characters move are included in the game-designing world with useful terminology like Sprite and Rendor components are also related to Player Game Object.

In -order to convert your games design from the appropriate language to the code equivalent that can then be uploaded to these smart phones is equally very important when designing Andriod games, this is called bootstrapping a game. Bootstrapping helps the games update correctly by forging reciprocal input events.

Next you have to thread all the games technical graphics together at this level you are at the Game Thread part mentioned earlier about the games physics, the way in which destruction and collisions and other explosions you wish to re -create. At this point this is also where you embed your signature as designer of your mobile phone games.

So how do you get involved with software shared on Google phones? Firstly the integration and design is found in forum threads particularly when games are being designed, you can subscribe to these groups on Forums, many of these forums are free, and the great thing about the 100 or so thousand developers throughout the world is they are interested in you learning the skills. When you learn these skills from them, the hope is you will share your frustrations with playing around with language on loading time it takes for, accessibility for your host as Java specific optimization is said to: ‘improve the compatibility with software’ and fortunately this code is very easy to use. The problem is troubleshooting the mistakes; this is where experts in the Language become helpful. If you wish to work with others, this app building will not happen over night you will need to forge relationships with other C++ Java Script users.

One of the growing problems when using C++ and Javascript is the size of memory used, when designing a game. You should always first consider whether you game can be realistically designed within the data limitations, generally about 100 -300 ms. Once you know the size you can begin to invoke your code into the GC (Gaming code).

Ways around this problem of high Java scripted codes and low restricted space for games to be made within are to ignore what’s known as enums they are to heavy, delete read only strings (which you will have to do at the end of the game anyway when the game is done. Look for string in the frameworks of your Java code. Also avoid JNI functions especially within the inner loop for your Java code. For example things that say gl.gl ()Functions should be double checked.

By creating layers in the games art be it sky land or background you always need to intergate, this is part of any good arcade game games style. Some key terms you need to consider when expanding your glossary in order to understand the micro designing backgrounds is found in the design (vertex) of Meta tiles. Meta tiles are an important part of the mapping of most games for Google Apps and Google games on the Android HTC and other Google versions. Nokia is slightly different and their gaming markets are slightly more varied. You can test your backgrounds in what is known as SpriteMethodTest by checking the basic vert quads are in-line with your orthographic projections. You also have to watch the time it takes for these commands to bind with all the various tiles in the frame, this can take anything between 3- 5 ms when submitted to the games layers and the came itself to convert into an image takes an extra 16ms to show. You will also want to understand about the texture of your backgrounds map and be sure it is not to sparse. Sparse is a great word to submit to your terminology when communicating about designing games for handheld devices.

Here are some ways of troubleshooting your games tiled background. First you must understand about VRAM and how much is available on each game when you design games anything above will mean you have to pre render the tile map of the background of your game or app. This can also be predicted by knowing level size restrictions within the VRAM and the dynamics within the different textures of your layered background. When you get close to 60 Hz then stop and by doing this you should be enough for you to avoid any complications. According to research done in a collection of case studies Android has decided to improve the Android’s interface in the phones driver; which means these solutions of timing may now be obsolete although on my Andriod HTC this transition has not yet taken place. The App said to do this is called Froyo and is according to Google TV an app that speeds up not only the browsers response time and help integrate through Cloud servers from Google Chrome Browser extensions, to mobile phones and direct links between the two.

This correspondence is not blue tooth or e-mail activated it is a direction link done within Froyo on the browser and the mobile phone, you can find out more by searching Froyo on the net. Froyo also increases the speed of the phones games response, in the Google video on YouTube a red flashing screen shows when the phone without Froyo was slowing in response to the increase of the games characters moving on the screen. That response was not related to the background although to many layers designed in your game will cause a similar reaction. The way to avoid this is tile your image background from smaller images so it looks equal across the screen.

Some of the pitfalls of designing games online through open source and brainstorming through forums is that your code can be easily cloned reproduced and then rereleased under a different name, one example of Google Apps currently that are showing this surprisingly is Google Chromes new Browser. The real browser is not available yet but three apps this week show Google Chrome Fakes, where you click the Icon but still are using the same Android browser. For now you are better of avoiding these Apps, in fact one of them is nothing to do with the browser it just simply adds the Google Chrome Icon as a screensaver. With this in mind, any security you can carry out when developing Open Source software will make sure your withhold your original ideas. If you can call them original then that will hold strong and hopefully you will now have a new skill that can earn you money in today’s modern craving society.

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