CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidarchitecture
kaid
kaid

Reputation: 1249

New to Android development. Should I use a game engine?

I'm a CS student intent on building an 2D android game. After hacking tutorial code I've got something running similar to what I want but it's not very clean. Having never done games before, I then started looking online at paradigms and learning about threads/logic-render independence/game architecture. And honestly I don't know really how to that yet.

I'm reading this article, and this guy definitely has more of an idea than I do.

Should I go ahead use a game engine (I feel a little like cheating) or should I do everything from scratch? I just have no idea how long it'll take to do the ground work for a simple 2D game.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2185

Answers (2)

DRiFTy
DRiFTy

Reputation: 11369

Personally if you aren't that familiar with how everything works then there is no better way to learn than to dive right in and start playing around. A game engine does all of the setup work for you and is optimized. That is not saying that you couldn't do the same yourself. Plus you will learn a lot, and in my opinion it really wasn't that hard to figure out (I was in your same position not too long ago)... There are many really good game engines out there such as Andengine and libGDX (The best two in my opinion) and these may definitely be something that you use in the future. But I would first recommend just making simple game that draws to the Canvas on the main UI thread to figure out how it all works. Then I would move onto the SurfaceView and do all your drawing from a thread. This will teach you the basics of a game engine. There are many tutorials about setting up a basic game engine with the Android SurfaceView.

This tutorial is pretty nice... Just do some searching around.

Upvotes: 1

ChrLipp
ChrLipp

Reputation: 15668

Of course you should use a game engine, this is not cheating because there is still enough work to do. I recommend to use AndEngine (see http://www.andengine.org/). Take a look at the examples and also at the showcase app downloadable via the bar code on their site.

See also the AndEngine entries on StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/andengine

Upvotes: 2

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