On March 24th, I will be giving a guru session at Mediamatic Bank (Amsterdam) about tools to build games for Android. This session is organized partly by Appsterdam and partly by the Dutch Android User Group, that’s why we have half of the seats on the Appsterdam meetup page and the other half in the DutchAUG page

There are a few spots left, and I believe it is going to be an interesting one, so go and get one!

I will publish the slides on this blog once the session is done.

Abstract

When thinking about building a game for Android, one can write it from scratch. Or you can look for tools, libraries and engines that already exist so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

We did that at The Pill Tree for both Chalk Ball and Space Cat, both games have different requirements and the solutions we found were also different. In this session I will summarize the strong and weak points of AndEngine and jPCT-AE and the uses you can make of them.
I will also give a brief explanation of other libraries that are interesting, such as ScoreLoop / OpenFeint for scores and awards and give a short introduction to virtual currency and incentivated ads.
After the talk, I will provide the people with the samples of both engines and we will play around with them.