Reddit reviews Beginning Android Games

Shameless plug: if you want to dive into mobile game dev, and have zero game dev experience, but know how to code in Java, you can give my book "Beginning Android Games, 2nd edition" a try.

I'm sure you can find a "backup-copy" on the net if you can't cough up the money for it. If you have the money, you can feel super special, as that keeps up our libgdx build servers :D

I used beginning android games. https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Android-Games-Robert-Green/dp/1430246774. It takes you through building your game without using a framework/Engine. I have used this for creating "Chibble" which now has 700K downloads. PM me if you need help.

LibGDX is open source, so they make no money from it. They do have a donate button on the website, and Mario Zechner (the author) has a decent book for sale. He's also planning a new book focused on LibGDX

the creator of libgdx has written himself a book: http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Android-Games-Mario-Zechner/dp/1430246774/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=1SDBYZHA2WKYBP3930XK

Check out Beginning Android Games. It's written by Mario, the guy behind LibGDX.

You still need to write the game even if you're usign a framework. It simplifies stuff for you, stuff like loading textures, binding them to an opengl context, making draw calls. It's a lot of work, which is kinda tedious and every single game does it in the same manner, that's why people write those frameworks.

Now that I think of it, I can recommend something. Beginning Android Games is a book written by libgdx founder, Mario Zechner (/u/badlogicgames, he's active on reddit and posts on /r/gamedev). I'm not sure if I linked to the latest edition though. It might be a little outdated technologically (it talks about OpenGL ES 1.x, no one uses it anymore and just recently, libgdx dropped support for it) but the concepts are valid and you'll be able to write a working game with it.

The book goes in detail over the basics on how to start and in the process, you create a framework of your own, something that libgdx actually was born from. So if you decide to go with libgdx somewhere along the path, it should also make it easier for you.

You might consider going thru each part of libGDX Audio/Gfx/Files/Input/Life cycle and talk about how they are fundamental to game creation or something.

I highly recommend Mario's book, he goes into detail about each of these in the context of Android. You might mention it to the class. Honestly even if they aren't interested coding in Java or even Android, it still an amazing book on how to code a game in general.
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Android-Games-Mario-Zechner/dp/1430246774/

You can take a look at this book it's a bit old but it was written by the creator of libgdx and from my experience provides a pretty good understanding of how the base engine works and how it's meant to be used.

I used this book to learn OpenGL ES using Java. Its actually pretty fantastic. If Java isn't your thing, there's a similar book for C++ here.

I plan on doing a bi-weekly set of articles remaking classic games using a modified engine from the Beginning Android Games book....once my Ouya ships and I can start testing on it.

This book is well written, and walks you through the creation of a couple basic games like that from scratch. Though the author is the same guy who maintains LibGDX, so as the other poster said you could just use that.

I really like the Beginning Android Games book, plus it does a snake game as a tutorial for one of the chapters.

That book also covers installing and setting up the development environment.

The one labeled 2nd edition by Apress is the latest edition (actually the third edition), it was published in 2012:

http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Android-Games-Mario-Zechner/dp/1430246774/

I'm not a real programmer or anything but i'd recommend eclipse over netbeans... just seems to be more support for netbeans (but again not a real programmer but i made an app once) Do you have any programming experience? If so This book is awesome and leads you to This framework which is written by the same guy and is great for programming for android. I can't remember the book I first learned on which would be better for no programming experience

Beginning Android Games. It's generally applicable, despite the title.