J2ME Game Programming

Description
Up until now I've found a complete lack of any good books on developing games for J2ME. I previously purchased MicroJava Game Development but found it simplistic and too broad (who cares about WAP???). J2ME Game Development absolutely blew me away. This is 800 pages of some of the best game development text I've seen. That's not just J2ME development, but 2D games in general... the coverage is brilliant.

The beginning of the book provides a solid introduction to J2ME/MIDP and then shows how to create a simple game. After that the author walks through development of a sophisticated four-way scrolling action game. There's coverage of sprites, tile engines, physics, world scrolling, raycasting, map editing, save games, menu systems, device ports, isometric engines, AI coding... and the list just goes on.

From a J2ME focus there's a chapter on how to setup a build system and use preprocessing to manage all the little device specific API calls as well as a cool way of handling localization issues.

In the last half there are two chapters on how to present the game to distributors and publishers and then how to sign a deal with them to make money from the game. Nice to see some commercial sense in a technical book.

At the end there's some extra chapters covering multiplayer gaming, how to make your own raycasting engine and even how to make an isometric engine.

Thankfully this book does not fall into the trap of concentrating on MIDP 2's useless game API. I applaud the decision to stick with the core of game programming and not waste time on MIDP 2 specifics (or MIDP 1 specifics for that matter). This is a book about making games. The author's approach of teaching how to make your own sprite/tile engine and then introduce MIDP 2 as an add-on is exactly right. Well done.

I've been waiting for this book to be released since it was announced. With the combination of Martin Wells and Andre Lamothe it had to be something good. I have to say I'm not disappointed. If you're thinking of developing just about any type of 2D game (not just J2ME) I'd recommend you buy this book.

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