12. Physics

In game development, “physics” is the collection of effects that mimic the physics of the real world. Physics don’t enter into every type of game, of course. For example, you generally won’t need physics if you are developing a board game. Other games are almost entirely physics based, with missiles of various kinds following natural arcs, crashing into piles of objects that then break or fall down under the influence of gravity.

As we’ll see, a very complete physics engine for use in our games is available as an extension to AndEngine. We’ll investigate that engine and related tools in this chapter, and then build a little physics-based gamelet to augment our V3 example game. We won’t come anywhere close to investigating all that ...

Get Learning Android Game Programming: A Hands-On Guide to Building Your First Android Game now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.