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Android

Posted by Matthew Ong
Matthew Ong
6,041 Points

Making an Android game

Hey Treehouse, this question is pretty broad so sorry about that.

I was just wondering if anyone had recommendations for what resources to look at if my end goal is to make a full fledged multiplayer android game. I've already made it a decent way through the android track, but it doesn't seem like any of the courses talk about many of the things required for game development.

Here are some of the specific elements I had questions about:

How do you connect to an external server for all of the game processing?

What are the most popular external backbone languages?

How does graphic animation work?

If anyone has any information about any of this, or can point me to some resources or tutorials, it would be greatly appreciated. Sorry for the broad nature of my question. I've just started learning Android and I'm just trying to untangle my brain a bit and identify what I need to work on exactly :)

1 Answer

Aurelian Spodarec
Aurelian Spodarec
7,369 Points
Aurelian Spodarec
Aurelian Spodarec
7,369 Points

Hi, i don't know the android track here, i didn't take it. But first thing first.

Do you know anything about android? can you make simple apps? if the answer is no :

Go throw treehouse resource and look on youtube or other webistes too.
You need to start slow, if you take android track , such as crystal ball , it will teach you about animation , yes animation , everything comes with it own time. You just need to be patient.

Look on every course of android and put trailer if possible , if not just look at the introduction on the first lesson .

I hope this helps.

Matthew Ong
Matthew Ong
6,041 Points

I think that the crystal ball app has been removed from the Android track because it was outdated. Is there any other treehouse tutorial that teaches animation? Thanks for your help!

Aurelian Spodarec
Aurelian Spodarec
7,369 Points

Oh wow, i though they replaced it with new content. Well, the best thing is go on youtube or any other website . Or just read how it work. But i could say , its not hard to make animations . I tell you in a short way. You basically create the animation in 2D and you make it move , how? well you draw it the same . Like A stick you move a hand up , 1cm by 1cm till it has covered 5cm . So you have 5 pictures of it moving his hand up .

Then you create like an array where you put these images like 001 002 003 004 005 . And they appear one by other making an animation .

Of course , you might be doing in 3D but I'm assuming you are saying 2D.

I hope you can understand it and i hope the process on android is pretty the same .

Matthew Ong
Matthew Ong
6,041 Points

Ah that makes a lot of sense! I guess I could make a while loop and just redraw a new picture every couple milliseconds. I wonder if this is inefficient though... I'm sure I can find some android libraries that help out :) Thanks a lot for the ideas!

Harry James
Harry James
14,780 Points

Yes, the Android Documentation is your best friend for this! Just search for animation and you'll see some handy ways of going about this.

I also completely agree with Aurelian here though as what you're trying to do sounds very complicated.

Do take it one step at a time and just focus on the basics first. Don't go straight in there trying to make a multiplayer game. Instead, get the basic functionality of the game working before even taking a look at multiplayer.

The concept of multiplayer is definitely not an easy one if you're talking about live multiplayer (e.g: The other player moves in real-time on the players screen). But, something like a point leaderboard is a lot easier to implement (Especially in Android if you use Google Play Games as an API).