Many Android development books and websites suffer from providing only trivial examples for various features of the operating system and application programming interface (API), and never integrating those various examples into a whole solution. The examples in this book lead up to a playable 3D Android game, complete with an options menu, artificial intelligence for the enemies, and physics. Already coming in at over 400 pages, the book is unable to cover other important topics, such as networking [1], multi-player gaming [2], and multi-threading [3]. Also, since games in general tend to have rudimentary user interfaces, complex user interface issues, such as scaling and scrolling, are outside the scope of this book.

In the interest of limiting the book’s size, the author chose to cover most topics in a way that provides an introduction and gives the reader some idea of where to look next for more information. Such topics as game development, Android development, and Java Native Interface development could warrant the coverage of an entire book, so each is covered here only enough to remind the reader of prior knowledge, or point the reader to other sources. Nonetheless, examples are given for each of the topics covered, and the final result of the book is a complete and working 3D game, which can be extended or modified as desired.

The early chapters give a complete introduction to Android development and Java; if the reader is familiar with this information, the later chapters will be more valuable. Likewise, chapter 3 gives a refresher course on the 3D math required for doing 3D graphics. Even using the OpenGL library does not eliminate the need to understand what is going on mathematically. Game-specific 3D topics, such as game physics, motion, collision, and sound, are covered thoroughly with good examples. The Drone Grid case study is a 3D game built from scratch with full source code, and includes tanks with separate turrets, an enemy arena with artificial intelligence for patrolling and attacking, and a heads-up display for game stats such as health and score.

The final chapters include integration of the game into a whole, if simplistic, game, and even discuss publishing and marketing a game through the various app stores for Android. There is also a chapter dedicated to the Android native development kit, which allows native code to be written for functions that require high-speed machine-specific code written in a language such as C or C++.

All in all, the book is a worthy addition to the game development literature, putting together a working 3D game from scratch. It is recommended to have an actual Android device handy to undertake 3D game development, even for this book’s examples, because the emulators included with the Android development environment will not perform well enough for this purpose.