Building Android Games with OpenGL ES [Video]

Author: Amerigo Moscaroli
Publisher: Packt Publishing
ISBN: 178328613X
ISBN 13: 9781783286133
Course Length : 1 hour 42 mins
Rating: 4/10

While technically correct I found this course disappointing on many levels. On the plus side it does cover the whole development process from input handling through rendering to putting it on Google Play and not just the core game itself.

Sadly there are far more downs.

Material is generally covered too quickly with little depth or background explanation, all the while, the viewer is staring at endless lines of code. There is little to no explanation of key concepts: such as matrices and vectors. This is where the video format could have helped considerably with illustrative diagrams and animations. There are some diagrams, but far too few, incomplete, confusing and sometimes unlabelled.

Numerous lighting models are coded, as is a quaternion classs, even though they weren’t used or needed. These may be included for completeness or future use but without context or examples of their use they are pretty much wasted effort.

There is a lot of code to wade through, and while this is unavoidable the video manages to be both too fast (copy-pasting whole slabs of code) and too slow by painfully covering every line of code. Since the code is available for download this line-by-line coverage is particularly unwarranted. It felt like reading out loud from a book with no added value. Very dry and un-engaging.

It’s difficult to gauge who this is aimed at, basic subjects are mentioned but in such a superficial manner the viewer requires far more than a passing knowledge of Java, Eclipse, programming, 3D modelling and lighting. For example, the first chapter relies on a clean install of an earlier version of Eclipse. The former meant that keys steps were different and went unexplained, the latter that the rather vague catch-all fix it didn’t apply. In the event, I spent a whole day setting up Eclipse and the NDK without any help from the course material. It is unreasonable to expect a true beginner to even have a chance of passing this impromptu test.

Later topics are potentially interesting and useful, but again are dealt with perfunctorily.

Away from the content, the navigation is very limited only allowing movement between consecutive videos, with none between chapters without returning to the main index, and there is no search option.

It’s also very light; the videos could easily be watched in less than a couple of hours, while much of the information is readily available on the web.

Overall, a missed opportunity, that while technically accurate was very dry and uninvolving.