There are many development tools available to make creating an Android game a little easier for developers. What if you didn’t need to be a developer to create a great Android Game? There is a program available that we have personally used in the past before the Android Platform was added that really is easy to use called GameMaker by Yoyo Games.
While it makes the difficult task of creating an Android game easier it also allows for app development for Windows, Mac, HTML5 (Facebook), and iOS. We will however be focusing on the Android module specifically here with GameMaker Studio.
Create Games with GameMaker’s Android Module:
You can create Android games around 80% faster using the GameMaker platform than with the SDK and a software like eclipse. The process is streamlined in that it ensures compatibility with the many different hardware and screen resolutions that Android devices have. Since the Android platform has sold over 300 million devices running the popular OS this alone can be one of the most difficult parts of Android development.
GameMaker will allow you to use their integrated development environment to deal with “objects” instead of having to develop every aspect yourself. These objects are things like the fonts, sounds, images, music, and other resources that actually make up the physical game itself. Not only is this made easier but its accompanied by a drag and drop interface for easy development.
If your not into creating a game strictly with what is offered within the GameMaker Studio you can also dive into the code behind it with their source control scheme along with making it easy to allow teams of developer to work on the same project.
GameMaker Studio Android Module Features:
- Backgrounds, sprites & images
- Animated graphics
- Rotate sprites
- Modify resources at run-time – sprites, backgrounds, paths etc.
- Particle effects
- 3D graphics
- 3D hardware acceleration
- Native physics support
- Off-screen surfaces – for rendering dynamic textures
- Font control
- Advanced text drawing – rotation etc.
- Sound effects & music
- Built-in data structures – stacks, lists, dictionaries, queues etc.
- Paths and timelines
- AI pathfinding
If you play around with the GameMaker Studio software please let us know what you think and let us know what you’ve created. Currently the GameMaker Studio is priced at $99 which is quite a deal if your looking at getting into Android Game development.
Source: Yoyo Games