Unfortunately, for those that do share my enthusiasm, there is a kind of glass wall on the path of progress that frustrates many aspiring Android game developers.

Android uses Java to make games. Every Android book, even those aimed at so-called beginners assumes readers to have at least an intermediate level of Java, and most require anadvanced level. So good-to-excellent Java knowledge was a prerequisite for learning Android.

Unfortunately, learning Java in a completely different context to Android can sometimes be a little dull and much of what you learn is not directly transferable into the world of Android anyway.

To add to this that games are arguably more advanced than regular GUI based apps and you can see why beginners to Android game development are often put off from starting.

But it doesn't need to be like this. In this book I have carefully placed all the Java topics you would learn in a thick and weighty beginner's tomb and reworked them into six games, starting from the incredibly simple through to an open-world 2D platformer.

If you want to make games or just want to have more fun when learning Java and Android, it makes more sense, is vastly more enjoyable, and is significantly quicker and more rewarding to teach Java and Android in a game development environment. This book will teach Java with the single overriding goal of learning to develop professional standard games, but this knowledge is also transferable to non-Android Java environments and non-games Android environments. And that's what this book is about.