Introduction to Android Game Development Kit
With growing digitalization, the gaming industry continues to enjoy exponential growth as one of the greatest contributors to today’s entertainment. Mobile app development industry’s revenue growth, accruing 52% of the gaming market worldwide.
Developing a mobile game requires a development platform, tools, and thorough planning. Google introduced Android Game Development Kit to help you improve both your game development workflow and developer experience. Depending on the type of game you are planning to create, there are several extremely powerful tools provided by the Android Game Development Kit that can make your Android Game Development process simple.
This article aims to introduce and discuss some advanced Android Game Development Kit features.
Let’s first start with understanding, what is an Android Game Development Kit.
Android Game Development Kit
The Android game development Kit (AGDK) is a set of extensions, libraries, and tools to make Android Games development easier, especially using the C and C++ languages. It provides a wide range of tools, and advanced development features to build & deliver high-quality Android games.
Significant reasons for using Android Game Development Kit
Inbuild Code For Gaming: Provided libraries have been built and tested with performance in mind using C or C++ APIs.
Reduce Fragmentation: Provide features, tools, and libraries that work across many different Android devices & versions, thus reducing fragmentation.
Built by Android, for Android: Provided features will be enhanced by future android platform updates, and provided libraries will support backward compatibility when required.
Now let’s explore some more key areas of game development where AGDK could be useful.
Some Important Features Provided by AGDK
Facilitate Integrated workflows:
To make Android game development more efficient, it provides many up-to-date integrated workflow tools, that smoothly integrate with your existing workflows.
Introduced Android Game Development Extension:
Android game development extension for visual studio enables you to develop multiplatform games in C or C++ on Windows using Microsoft Visual Studio and deploy them to Android effectively.
Provide Engine Integrations:
An integrated gameengine provides tools and libraries that contribute to improving performance and stability without making any changes to the development environment.
Provide Plugins For Engine:
Google focuses more on plugins providing tools required to build high-quality Android games in game engines rather than engine integration.
C/C++ Game Development Libraries:
AGDK provides a suite of C and C++ development libraries to make games easier to develop, debug, and maintain while minimizing the amount of Java Native Interface(JNI) that you need to use.
Advanced Features of AGDK for C/C++ game libraries:
Game Activity:
Gaming activity allows your app to respond to Android lifecycle events from C or C++ code and enables you to take advantage of advanced platform features because it renders into a SurfaceView.
Text Input:
Provides a stable way to use the software keyboard in C, which is officially supported and will work appropriately across all android versions.
Game Controller Library (Paddleboat):
The game controller helpsyou manage input and enables you to reconnect to the device when it would be necessary.
Performance Optimization Feature :
Performance optimization features android game development kit help you accurately identify stability and performance problems during development and accurately monitor performance post-launch.
Android GPU Inspector(AGI):
Allows you to monitor your GPU workloads, and get exposure to the areas for optimization.
Android Profilers give you access to some potential tools, which help you analyze CPU usage, memory, and graphics calls and enable you to optimize your game.
Android Performance Tuner is used for optimizing performance or fidelity offs across all devices. Android Performance Tuner helps you obtain these performance insights, thus you must integrate APT into your game, and then publish it on the Google Play store.
The above-listed advanced features are helpful in performance optimization and contribute greatly to fostering the best gaming development practices.
Here are a few More Android Game Development Best Practices to prioritize characteristics such as performance, battery life, or storage space while targeting the widest range of Android devices and varied screen types.
- Game modes targeting improved performance or battery life
- Vulkan and OpenGLES optimizations
- Android NDK best practices
- The system, GPU, and GPU frame profiling
- Performance tuning
- 3D asset optimization
Final Words On Android Game Development Kit
Android Game Development Kit helps you enhance your game developer experience and workflow. It will help throughout development including optimizing, launching, and iterating post-launch.
If you are looking for game development services, get consult with Binary Informatics(BI) expert. BI is the leading gaming app development company.
Hope this essay helped you learn about Android Game Development Kit. Want to explore more about our development capabilities, feel free to comment below!!
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