After releasing
catch the cat, it's time to get some info about Android development
IDE, coding and time
Working with android is pain without a real device: emulator isn't comparable with Android device so keep in mind this. Eclipse is a first class IDE, many many plugins and more important
Android Development Tools! With this tools, Eclipse and your phone you can start android development for free, simple right? Many tutorial around so I will not waste time setup all things.
Library for making games with Android
I've worked a bit with Slick (
Fuzzy,
Escape from colors,
Pong clone,
You cant' win,
Cute tower defense,
Jpacman are some examples) so when Slick creator
announced an adaptor for using it into Android I've been interested in it.
Main problem with Slick AE is no information :( just a
forum here where ask ) and a
svn repository here with an
example here.
So working with Slick AE is in first instance a matter of faith and deveotion to Slick: if you never played a bit with Slick, don't try Slick AE, because you have to understand a little bit about Slick before continue.
Slick AE is only a wrapper around Libgdx calls to Android so you can program games with Slick, try it and deploy into Android, cool right?
There are a lot of alternative for example
Libgdx: it's different from Slick, but not so much and you can do same things!
Gemserk for example use it a lot for
their games
Downsides
Bad thins happens sometimes: for example when you have a beta library like SlickAE and a no real layer for separate desktop version from Android version. So input game name is a thing that in desktop version is not possible. It's just an example how much difficult could be working in a mixed enviroment Android/Desktop, without a preparation for this. My suggestion is to write little games, try different libraries and then move to bigger projects!
Conclusion
Catch the cat it's a small game, build with no todo list, no plan and no objective than learn how to build and deploy a little game on Android. And this experiment, despite some flaws (code is a mess, one big class for everything, one for storing information into sql lite android memory and so on..) I've learned a lot.
Games could be a nice way to learn how to develop in a new platform and any Java programmer must try to do something for Android: it's easy, fast and cool!
