J2ME Game Programming [With CDROM]

I'm a teacher of game programming in a brasilian educational institution and this book is going to help me a lop when I teach game programming on mobile devices.

I purchased this book when I was doing my final year project on J2ME. Although I was even new to J2SE I started coding in J2ME since I had to finish the project, using the internet sources and some introductory books to J2ME. After lots of disappointment in understanding J2ME I found this book and in a very short time I built up my knowledge of J2ME to write a 4000 line,object-oriented,well designed J2ME application. The book was not a game book to me, it was a complete source of J2ME.

Some months ago I did an exhaustive research on books about J2ME + MIDP1.0. (Although MIDP2.0 or Symbian is what you need to know to develop for the latest handsets, the big market out there is MIDP1.0) Comparing reviews from this site and citations in expert forums like Nokia Forum, it was soon clear that this book was a winner. This book is a heavy one. You will dedicate a complete month to master it. And a second month to develop your own game engine based on the one proposed in this book. What I liked most about this book is exactly that. There are no open-source or cheap game engines for J2ME+MIDP1.0 around. You have to assemble your own! And Wells does a very good job explaining you every decision he made while developing the framework for the game presented in the book. More precisely, the book presents two games. The first one is a Frogger clone, done in a pretty simple way...after the first chapters learning J2ME he shows you how to code a prototype of a game. But developing a real game is a much more involved task. That's he spends the next 300 pages explaining you how to develop your game in a professional way. Perfect! The book also has chapters on marketing your game and sales aspects. It also has a brilliant chapter on isometric games and a -let's say- experimental chapter on a 3d technique known has raycasting (you probably wont use it but its very interesting to read anyway). It also has an introduction chapter to MIDP2, explaining you how some of the decisions he made in the development of the game where influenced by the migration path logic to MIDP2. A word of warning: you will find some typographical mistakes in the book. There is even an example code at the beginning which is misplaced. But you probably won't type anything from the book, everything you need to try the examples is located in the CD. The book is in a way outdated. It explains how to code in a IDE like Eclipse and compile versions for the various handsets using Ants. Today we use Netbeans which does that transparently. Anyway, its good to know how is it done in the inside. I finished reading this book 2 month ago and I still use it as reference while I'm developing games. If you just want to know about mobile game programming, don't buy this book, it's too hard and long for you. But if you want to develop games professionally, this is the right book for you.

Finally! Ive been trying to learn how to program sprite based 2d games for a awhile now, but have not found real common sense explanations or tutorials, until i got this book. Wells explains everything in such a way that it makes you both laugh and understand his instructions at the same time. He shows you how to program MIDP games exactly the way I would want someone to teach me, down to earth mixed with a little geek humor, which if your reading this book you will relate to. Its takes you from basic to advanced and you never feel like your lost, its takes alot of time and concentration but thankfully to the way the book is laid out and Wells teaching style you dont get a headache, you feel like someone is right there with you showing you how to do it. Worried about MIDP 2.0? Dont be, you need to learn everything thats in this book in the first place before you even worry about 2.0, true this book is not a 2.0 reference, but if your a java developer then you know how easy it is to transition into a new API implentation once you know the prior. After your done with this you can look at MIDP 2.0 and use what you want to from the new release to take your game one more step forward. Highly reccomend.

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.