Customer Reviews

J2ME Game Programming (Game Development)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

I bought this book because I'm looking to get into J2ME game development. There are VERY few books on the subject, and this book (although written for MIDP 1.0 and not the newer MIDP 2.0) seems to be the one that everybody recommends.

I've worked up through the examples in Chapter 5 and so far, the content is great. If I were just grading on content then I'd definately give it 5 stars. What I'm finding I'm having a huge problem with about this book is the staggering amount of errors in the code. I simply can't believe that a book could be released to the public (and have the publisher expect consumers to pay money for it) with so many typos. So far EVERY SINGLE example I've entered and ran has had errors. Not syntactical errors (so you can't chalk it up to "I just didn't type the code in right"), I'm talking LOGIC errors that either cause the sample applications to run incorrectly or completeley different than how they are described in the text (in the case of the first example in chapter 5. Its practically an entirely different application than what the text says its supposed to be).

Whoever proofread this book at Thomson publishing must not have been a technical person who just glossed over the code and focused on the content of the text. But most of the blame has to fall on the author's shoulders for writing and releasing code that doesn't work right in the first place...

Either way, I really can't say that I can encourage or endorse this book so far.

I hope that when I get into the main focus (after the first 200 pages of the book which rehash the same old J2ME techniques that you can read online or get from a J2ME book) that the 2 example games you write in the book from start to finish do not have so many errors.

If you want to write a MIDlet for MIDP 1.0 then this is the book for you. The book has very detailed coverage of J2ME MIPD 1.0. I have been waiting for this book to come out (original release date was January 2004) for a long time now in hopes that I would finally have a good MIDP 2.0 reference. There are already plenty of 1.0 books available. I realize that 2.0 was only released last year and there are only a handful of 2.0 capable devices available. However, as I said, there are already plenty of 1.0 books available and I would expect that a book released in 2004, a year after 2.0 was released, to cover the latest version of MIDP in great detail.

The title of the book, "J2ME Game Programming," combined with the release date of 2004 led me even further to believe that this book would cover the latest version of MIDP since this latest version has specific tools for developing games. Imagine my disappointment when there was only 15 pages of coverage for the Game API.

The author even states in the book that while MIDP 2.0 has great tools for writing games they chose to cover 1.0 in detail because most devices are 1.0 devices. This is not a good reason in my opinion. I hate to keep coming back to this but there are already a ton of books available that cover MIDP 1.0. There are almost NO books that cover MIDP 2.0 and there are NONE that cover Game Programming with MIDP 2.0 in detail.

MIDP 2.0 has been out for a year and developers need to begin working on their projects BEFORE the devices saturate the market. Since there are already some MIDP 2.0 capable devices and more will follow quickly it would be great if someone would release a book that covered this topic.

This book will show you how to code games using J2ME, with a clear focus on creating games for mobile phones. The chapters in this book are intended to be read sequentially, so if you're already familiar with the content covered in a particular section, you should skim over it rather than skipping it entirely. The author assumes you're already familiar with Java, or at least another object-oriented programming language. You don't need to be an expert, but you do need to know the basics. The book requires an understanding of rudimentary mathematics; however, the toughest level you get to is simple trigonometry, and even then the explanations are fairly detailed. It is also assumed that you're familiar with basic PC operations and can take care of environmental details such as downloading and installing software. Sometimes the language of the book is just a little too cute ala Andre LaMothe, but the information is all there.

Part I is an introduction to J2ME, including its origins and current position in the marketplace. This section also takes a look at a range of typical J2ME devices and mentions the sort of gear for which you'll be developing.

In Part II you'll grab all the tools you need and set up your environment for development. Then there is a review the APIs provided as part of Sun's J2ME SDK, along with the added features available with device-specific libraries. At the end of this part, all these tools are put into action with the creation of a small action game called "RoadRun" that presents the player with the challenge of helping a little wombat across a busy highway. The game is very simple and small, but it does illustrate some key points of J2ME game coding. I thought it was a good beginning example.

Part III covers real project development. There's a discussion of how to refine game ideas into project plans before embarking on the development of a full-scale action game called Star Assault. Then, through nine chapters the book covers all aspects of developing a commercial-quality game, including graphics, physics, environments, front ends, device-specific customization, and finally localization. This is the real meat of the book for people interested in game development, but even here there is nothing particularly difficult going on.

Part IV moves into the world of marketing and publishing games. This section looks at how to create marketing material to promote your game, as well as how and where you can earn revenue. This material is all pretty subjective.

Part V takes J2ME game development further by covering the features available in MIDP 2. The author shows how to create different types of games by developing both an isometric and 3D ray-casting engine. Finally, the book explores networking with MIDP and how it can be utilized to create multiplayer games.

All in all, this is a pretty good introduction to J2ME and to writing games using it. Just don't expect anything advanced in the arena of mathematics or physics, and get used to sitting through the author's "surfer dude" narrative style. Plus, although it is mentioned, there is a lack of sufficient information on MIDP 2.0 due to the date of publication.

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.

It's a great book! I recommend this book for people who want really to learn j2me.
Congratulations Martin