Game Development with the Android SDK vs. XNA vs. HTML5

Game Development with the Android SDK vs. XNA vs. HTML5 Ming Chow Tufts OpenCourseWare Introduction to Game Development Spring 2012

Game Development with the Android SDK vs. XNA vs. HTML5 Ming Chow

The Purpose of Your Final Project ● Develop a game on a real platform ● But why?

Factors ● Memory limitations ● Display capabilities (from low-res to HD) ● User input that does not include keyboard or mouse ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

(touch, multi-touch, controllers, mouse) Internet access Usage fees (especially for mobile) Built-in capabilities (phone, GPS, camera, Kinect) Micropayment (Xbox Live, iTunes App Store) Services (e.g., Push Notification, In-Game Notification) Multitasking Concurrency (multi-core processors)

Java ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Both a compiled and interpreted language Source code looks very similar to C++ Everything in Java is object-oriented Strongly-typed language No pointers Memory leaks are prevented by automatic garbage collection in Java No structs There is no such thing as a main program Has a String type Supports a true boolean A semicolon (';') is not required to close a class definition

Android for Games ● See my Android tutorial material at https: //github. com/tuftsdev/WebEngineering/tree/master/a ndroid ● Hardly any framework to write games ● Want to build a game from scratch? You have to write your own game loop and even timer code.

The Good, The Bad, The (Very) Ugly with Android and Java ● The good: portability, no draconian process to put apps onto Google Play (formerly known as the Android Market) ● The bad: Java is still slower than C; legal issues between Oracle and Java cloud the ecosystem; lack of game frameworks ● The very ugly: fragmentation of devices; many app markets

HTML5 ● Not just a markup language but is a clientside stack of three languages: ○ HTML - the markup language ○ Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) - for presentation (i.e., design and layout) ○ JavaScript - for interactivity

The Browser as a Game Platform ● Being pushed heavily by Google as evident with Chrome ● Many APIs ● Creating a game: ○ Sprite sheets ○ JavaScript ○ setInterval(code, millisec) for game loop

The Good, The Bad, The (Very) Ugly with HTML5 for Games The good: cross-platform The bad: too new; every major player (Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) is playing their own HTML5 game The very ugly: browser-incompatibilities galore! Run http://html5test.com/ on your browser (and then compare result with others)

C# ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Loosely based on C++; very similar to Java Object-oriented Managed environment Like Java, there is automatic garbage collection Array bounds checking No header files, includes or forward declarations necessary No semicolon after a class declaration in C# Everything derives from object

XNA 4: The Game Loop (In General) Initialize(); LoadGraphicsContent(); while (stillPlaying) { Update(); Draw(); } UnloadGraphicsContent();

XNA 4: The Content Pipeline ● A process once content is added to Content of project ● Flexible ● The input: some game asset in some format (e.g., artwork) ● The output: a compiled asset ● Why? For building, loading, and optimizing various forms of content ● Diagram: http://msdn.microsoft.com/enus/library/bb447745.aspx

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly with XNA 4 for Games The good: some portability; excellent APIs -many critical elements such as a sprite class and the game loop already provided The bad: many dependencies (from .NET libraries to Visual Studio); C# is slower than C; very little low-level access unlike the real Xbox dev kit; size restriction The ugly: the indie game store on Xbox Live...

The Great Debate ● What would I choose?