Android

The Singleton Pattern, Java HashMap, Storing Bitmaps Efficiently, and Designing Levels
If you have landed on this page from a search engine you should first view part 1 of this platform game tutorial. This is going to be a very busy and varied tutorial. We will learn the theory of the Singleton design pattern. We will […]

Exploring Patterns and Planning the Platformer Project
This project is taken from a previous version of my book Learning Java by Building Android Games. The latest version, version 3 went into more detail in earlier projects and so this project did not fit. Some of what I say in this tutorial (and the next 3 tutorials) […]

If you are lucky and NOT old enough to remember Pong then you should take a look at it and find out some more before continuing. We will be programming the further simplified, single-player, Squash-style version of the game. The player must bounce the ball off the “back” wall and he gets a point each […]

As the title suggests, in this project we will build a simple snake-style game. This style of game has been around since the mid-1970s under other names like Worm and Surround. I played this thing for many hours on the ancient Sword M5 and the “green screen” Sharp MZ80 back in the 1980s. Snake finally […]

In this tutorial, we will see the tricks and the code required to achieve a parallax scrolling background effect. The parallax effect is when different layers of backgrounds are moved at different speeds to achieve the effect of motion and depth. By moving the front layer(s) faster than the back the distance/depth effect is achieved. […]

This tutorial game project introduces the concept of a viewport. This is the aspect of our game which handles which part of the game-world is drawn to the screen. First, we need to decide what to draw and then we must convert their “real-world” coordinates to the screen coordinates at which to draw them. If […]

In this project, we will put into practice everything we learned in part 1 and part 2 of the tutorial series on trigonometric functions. We will draw a simple triangle-shaped spaceship to the screen by drawing lines between three points/vertices. We will then see how we can do the math to smoothly rotate it and […]

This very simple tutorial will quickly bring your games to life by drawing the frames of animation from a row of frames drawn consecutively in the same file. We will see how to draw each of five frames one after the other and after we have drawn the last frame, loop back to the first. […]

Welcome to the Space Invaders coding project for Android. In this game project, we will step through everything you need to know to have a fully playable Space Invaders clone running on your Android phone or tablet. The wave of invaders is genuinely challenging yet achievable and it would be simple for you to extend […]

In this project, we will build a really simple but fun version of the classic Breakout game for Android. Often known as the “Brick breaker game” the history of the game is interesting and if you like nostalgia I urge you to read this history of Breakout. Breakout sometimes called Arkanoid was developed by Atari […]