Pages

Moving into Android

I've just started looking at moving into Android development.

Installing and setting up the Android development kit was simple, and easier than last time I looked. It still looks pretty crude compared to Xcode though.

Next question is what to use for Game dev.

Obvious answer (given I used Cocos2d for iPhone) is Cocos2dx, but turns out it's not that simple, so I'm also looking at AndEngine, Monkey and Unity.

Here's where my thoughts are so far:

Cocos2dx
Means developing for both platforms in C++.  I haven't used C++ for about 10 years, but used to love it.  Now though, to be honest, I don't particularly want to move away from Objective C on iOS, particularly as I'll also be developing non-Cocos apps as well.  In theory though, the same code should run on both platforms.  I say in theory, because at the moment I can't get it to work (the apps compile but crash on startup).

AndEngine
AndEngine appears to be a kind of Cocos2d equivalent for Android, which means Java.  A quick look suggests it is very similar to Cocos2d, so porting may be pretty straight forward.  I haven't tried it yet though.

Unity
OK, this is a 3D Engine, but a couple of years ago there was a very limited offer to get the iOS and Android licenses for free, which I still have.  It's a very alien environment to be, being a 2D programmer at the moment,  but it seems to work very well - build to IOS as the target and you get an XCode project which runs fine.

Monkey
Monkey is a bit of wild-card. It comes from Blitz basic, which I used to love, and says it produced Android and iOS code.  The big downside is that there is no limited trial to test how well it does it - the trial only produced HTML 5.  I'm going to have a good look at it though, as it may be a really simple way into Android.  It costs $99 dollars, which isn't too bad.

Next thing I'm going to do is try to get AndEngine working.

Oh, and I need to get an Android phone - the Android emulator is simply terrible!

No comments:

Post a Comment