As a side project, I’m trying to develop a small game in Android.

As you know, Android is the new open source platform, designed by Google, for smartphones.

It is based on Linux, and the language used to develop applications on it is Java. So I decided to try to develop a small application for it: A game.

I will try to  explain here the things are discovered in this journey.

The project:

A very simple game that uses the touch screen capabilities of the phone: You throw a ball using you fingers and it must either go into holes, avoid pitfalls, bump into, errr…. bumpers and so on. You will have many different levels with many kinds of obstacles to overcome. This game will involve precision in your fingertips !

Starting:

First I downloaded the Android SDK, along with Eclipse and it’s plugin. All is clearly explained here and installs without an itch. Along with the SDK comes a smartphone emulator, that shows this:

Nice no ?

The Eclipse plugin integrates Android SDK seamlessly with eclipse: You can create a new android project, run it in the emulator, design the screen (with preview), etc….

Next part will talk about creating the game project using a provided sample  project.