Android App Development - Introduction

When I think back to my childhood, I think of the times my family used to go to the arcade/games centre. While playing the various games, I always had the same thought: "This game is awesome, but I wish I could change it so that it could have this feature or that feature". It was at this early age that I realized that it surely must be so fun to create and develop games.

Fast forward into the future, the practicality and financial stability of game development didn't seem like a viable option in South Africa. So unfortunately, I ended up not pursuing it. It was only when I started studying Computer Science at university and had my first module in Android Development, did the excitement return.

One of my first android applications was to create a media player. Oh, man, this was a fun but definitely challenging experience. Later in that same year, I partnered up with a friend to create a game. Yes, an actual game, just like I had dreamed when I was a child. The idea was to create a simple "phone pet" type of game. While we learnt a lot during this process, our busy university schedule kept us from finishing the game (Many years later, my friend actually finished the game and published it on the Play Store).

Years went by, and out of nowhere, I decided that I wanted to start making android games again. So I went ahead and purchased a development license, which was only 20$ or so. It seemed like a bargain of a price for a developer license that is lifetime (the license is associated to your google account). I suggest creating a separate Gmail account for this venture, as you don't want your personal mail account inundated with random spam. The main reason for the spam is that the chosen Gmail address is displayed on the Play Store, and is therefore at the mercy of the many web scrapers out there. Just have a look at the spam below.

So I've got a license now, what next? An IDE of course. I set out to find out what's the best tool for development. I strongly recommend going with the Android Studio IDE (https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html). It comes with a lot of the tools required to get your app onto the play store. It's actually built on top of IntelliJ for those Eclipse haters out there.

For your first app, I suggest trying to create a single page application that just captures some text and displays it. I actually made a Love Calculator and published that as my first app, just so that I could learn about the entire development and release cycle.

So, my first steps done, I'm excited to embark on this Android journey :)