When I first decided to really delve into this, I struggled a little with this question: “Where to begin?” Any clever person could tell you that you start by designing your game, writing it all out on paper and carefully planning it. But I didn’t want to do that – I knew the game I wanted, it’s more or less a clone of a game I played when I was younger so I know the ins and outs of what I want.
No, what I wanted was to dive right in and start making something. I knew my game would be a top down 2D game with a character you would move tile-by-tile by swiping in the appropriate direction (up, down, left or right). With that in mind, I figured a good place to start would be to render a block onscreen and create the controls that would move the character around.
To do this, I figured I would need a decent 2D graphics framework so I wouldn’t get bogged down reinventing the wheel the whole way through. I ran a quick search for “2D Android framework” and AndEngine was the first result. After reading up on it a little I decided to go with it for this project.
I would like to recommend AndEngine as a great framework, but bear in mind I’m talking from a position of relative ignorance. It seems to me that AndEngine has been pretty simple to get the hang of and has made learning this stuff a little easier, but I don’t have a lot to compare it with so your mileage may vary. Documentation is a little light (virtually non-existent) so you’re left manually combing through example games and apps trying to figure out how it all fits together. Once you get it though, it’s great!
That was my first step completed, I had found the framework that I would be using to create the game and I had my first goal clearly defined: create an onscreen block that can be moved around the screen by swiping.