Welcome to experience the Android Game Development Kit

Author / Android Games Product Manager Scott Carbon-Ogden

We Google Game Developer Summit 2021 released Android Game Development Kit (AGDK) . It is a set of tools and libraries that can help you develop, optimize and deliver high-quality Android games. Click here watch the video of new tools for Android game development for more details.

The functions in AGDK follow the following three key principles:

• written specifically for game development. We use C or C++ API to build and test all libraries while taking into account performance.
• reduces fragmentation . AGDK tools and libraries can operate in multiple different Android versions. Most functions can be run on most devices today.
• was built by Android and was born for Android. When the Android platform is updated in the future, these functions will be updated together, and these libraries may also support backward compatibility.

In the first release, we focused on the following three main areas that received a lot of feedback from the developer community: integrated workflow, C/C++ game library, and performance optimization.

integrated workflow

Generally speaking, the fewer tools you need to switch, the higher the efficiency. With AGDK, we provide new tools to help you easily develop Android games in the main IDE. We will focus on the part of the workflow where Google can add unique value and solve Android specific issues, while being compatible with the parts of your current workflow.

• The Android Game Development Extension (Android Game Development Extension) adds Android as a platform target to Visual Studio. In this way, existing multi-platform Visual Studio game projects can quickly integrate Android as a new platform. You can click here watch the video for more details.
• We are cooperating with some mainstream game engine developers to directly integrate our tools and libraries into the game engine. In this way, you do not need to make any changes to enjoy the performance enhancement and stability improvement.
• For the above integration can not be met, we have started to build Plugin for Unity and other game engine . These plug-ins are all in one place, so you can quickly find what you need.

C/C++ game library

With our game library for C/C++ development, you can start C language development with fewer Java Native Interfaces (JNI). Most games and game engines are written in C++, while Android development usually requires the use of the Java programming language. Using the Java native interface to connect these two programming languages is more complicated and may introduce errors or cause performance degradation. AGDK will provide a C language game library to minimize the use of Java programming language and JNI to help you build and customize game engines. This can help you build, debug, and maintain games more easily.

We will focus on the pain points of your feedback. The short term involves building basic classes for activities and inputs. In the long run, we plan to build more C language libraries to provide functions commonly used across game engines. We are ready to integrate the existing frame synchronization and high-performance audio libraries into the built C language library, while adding three new libraries:

1. Game Activity provides the basis for building C++ games. The library can provide a C language interface for all Android events (including screen rotation and application life cycle) that you expect. This helps you minimize the development time spent on the Java language. Unlike native Activity, Game Activity is not only compatible with fragments, but can also be extended, allowing you to integrate some favorite SDKs more easily.
2. Game Text Input (Game Text input) allows you to use the software keyboard stably in C language. The library is officially supported and can be used in multiple Android versions.
3. Game Controller (Game Controller) can process the input signal from the game controller in C language to map the function of the controller and reconnect to the device if necessary.

Please Click here learn more about the details than C / C ++ libraries from the video.

To simplify the integration process as much as possible, you can choose to obtain all our libraries in the form of Maven dependencies, pre-compiled Zip files or source code.

performance optimization

Our goal is to help you find any stability or performance issues before release, and to monitor and analyze the game after it is released to find any problems. We will first focus on the most important indicators such as frame rate, load time and memory, and will add new indicators over time.

• We are about to release Android GPU Inspector , which includes frame analysis functions. This feature will work with existing GPU analysis elements to help you fully understand any GPU-related issues. AGI is now launching a public beta version. You can learn more about GPU Inspector video
• for system, power and CPU performance profiler (Android Profiler) in Android Studio and AGDE, as well as a new native memory performance profiler that game developers can use to find inefficiency issues.
• Android Performance Tuner provides user telemetry solutions. With Android Performance Tuner, you can view the specific performance of different parts of the game, as well as the performance of the game on different devices. You may already be using this tool to monitor the frame rate, and now we will add a new load time monitoring feature. You can learn more in the great video

You can visit the official to get the latest resources on Android game development and download the AGDK. You can also view the video collection to learn about the full content of the 2021 Google Game Developers Summit. At the same time, you are welcome to continue to follow the "Google Developer" and "Android Developer" official WeChat public accounts to get the latest Android game development resources at any time.