J2ME Game Programming

Rating:
Summary: Game Programming Success is made easy with this book.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: 95% MIDP 1.0, only 5% MIDP 2.0
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent! The best book on J2ME development by far.
Review: 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.