If you’re interested in current tools for Android game development, with some new contenders take a look at the updated article: “An updated list of the best Android developer tools for your amazing mobile game.”

Given the broad increase in demand for Android game development services, multiple companies are showing great interest in this segment. That means employers are seeking original games, hiring game development companies, and Android professionals with game development experience.

Google’s own Android SDK is equipped with all the tools and software to help developers to produce a fairly solid game. However, the development of 2D custom Android games is not an easy task but is becoming simpler due to developer tools now on the market.

Here’s a few of those development tools for gaming that are currently out there.

Google Play game services

Google facilitates game developers and players with Google Play game services.  This SDK is intended for developers to package APIs that allow implementation with Google+. As it’s a cloud-connected SDK and platform, it means that developers can keep player information, game progress, achievements, and such in the cloud. Google Play Game Services is not only designed for Android devices, but is also available for iOS, and desktop computers using a web browser. The corresponding SDK for developers is already available.

Through Google+ developers get Google’s handy tools to make their games more social. To use game services, developers can set up the Google Play services SDK, and study the game services samples allow to learn how to use the major components of the SDK. Developers can also read detailed documentation for Google Play game services SDK and for quick access while developing apps, the API reference is available.

Game scores can be easily shared with other players and adding multiplayer capabilities is baked in.

Another interesting feature is the ability to sync game data between the web, iOS and Android Games. In this way, the same game can be played on multiple platforms and data can be stored in the cloud. All Android devices from Android 2.2 that have the Google Play Store are all equipped with the Play Games capabilities.

Unity

Multi-platform development for games is seen as a bugbear of the industry because the differences between platforms often mean different programming languages, separate APIs, and different behaviors. To ease this problem, multi-platform game engines have become the go-to tool. One such game engine that is most popular among Android developers is Unity.

Unity can be used to create a game that can be used on computers, smart phones, iPhone, PS3, and even Xbox. Unity provides an entire ecosystem for game development. This game development tool consists of a powerful rendering engine, fully integrated with a complete set of intuitive tools and fast workflow guides to create interactive 3D-content; easy publishing on multiple platforms; and thousands of high-quality ready resources in the Asset Store.

The assets supporting the object image provided is quite diverse, ranging from the simplest two-dimensional to 3-dimensional complex. Moreover, Unity is able to take pictures of software assets such as Autodesk 3DS Max, Autodesk Maya, Softimage, Blender, Modo, ZBrush, Cinema 4D, Cheetah 3D, Adobe Photoshop, Fireworks Adoble, and Allegorithmic Substance.

Game engine also supports application development languages ​​such as C#, UnityScript (in the form of JavaScript), and  can be integrated with BooScript Python language. Games developed in Unity will be able to support multiple platforms including iOS, Android, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, BlackBerry 10, Mac, Windows, Linux, Web Player, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii U.

Some famous games built on Unity Engine are Dead Trigger, Bad Piggies, Temple Run 2, Three Kingdoms Online, DreadOut , Galactic Rush , Roly Poly Penguin, Eyes On Dragon, and many more. Unity 4 is free, while Unity Pro (plus optional iOS, Android, BlackBerry add-ons) priced from $750 onwards.

Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine is a game engine for PC and consoles created by the company Epic Games. Initially implemented in the first person shooter Unreal in 1998, the engine being used by games such as Unreal Tournament, Deus Ex, Turok, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas, America’s Army, Red Steel, Gears of War, BioShock, BioShock 2, BioShock Infinite, Star Wars Republic Commando, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Mass Effect.

Unreal Engine technology provides a tried and tested high-quality development environment for mobile development. Teams using Unreal are equipped with tools that help them produce the quality necessary for standout titles to compete in the crowded mobile app space.

The latest Unreal Engine 4 ensures a high quality to the title from the point of view of the visual impact and is integrated with Unreal Editor suite, using C++ source code. The company also offers free edition of Unreal Engine 3, the Unreal Development Kit, which has had more than 2.25 million installation till date. The Unreal Engine 3 also applies in areas not related to video games such as simulation buildings, driving simulators, preview movies and terrain generation.

Get started with Unreal Engine on Android today.

Marmalade

British company Marmalade Technologies produces a platform that allows developers to build and distribute cross-platform applications quickly, easily and without compromise. A powerful set of development Marmalade SDK tools allows developers to deploy a single codebase for different OSes in a few clicks, saving time and money and increasing the potential audience for a wide range of platforms.

Marmalade includes a set of APIs for handling the mobile’s camera, GPS, microphone, accelerometer, 2D/3D graphics and more. It can be used for all kinds of applications, including video games. Developers who use Marmalade SDK can develop in the programming language C/C ++ using the standard libraries.

This game development tool can be used as a single development environment for Windows applications built in Visual C ++ or Mac via Xcode. Programmers can also choose utilize HTML5 code and Lua. Marmalade is also capable of translating source code cross-platform and provides simultaneous updates across all supported platforms.

The SDK is priced at $500 per year that includes Marmalade C++ and Marmalade Quick and Web Marmalade included for free.

Corona SDK

Corona SDK is an excellent choice for all types of mobile developers from beginner to advanced. Corona is a tool for quick and easy creation of apps and games for iPhone, iPad and Android development. The interesting thing about this SDK is that it has a very advanced physics engine and allows developers to create games with a few lines of code.

This SDK allows developers to create fast, powerful, cross-platform applications that can access APIs of other frameworks hook into hardware components such as camera, GPS and accelerator. Corona is also optimized to take advantage of hardware acceleration features, resulting in high performance in games and applications.

Corona uses the Lua programming language to create applications.

The license costs $199 per year and allows developers to develop only for iPhone or Android and $349 a year in the version that allows to work with both platforms.

Project Anarchy

Video game developers on Android rarely encode all their applications from scratch. Until now, to make a 3D game on Android without having a huge studio, the simplest solution remained Unity 3D game engine. But Unity can be very expensive as most of the key features are only available in the pro version for $1,500.

The open source 3D engine Project Anarchy is a new 3D game engine tool and freely distributed by Havok. This end-to-end mobile game engine allows you to ship games for free on iOS, Android and Tizen. Project Anarchy is really about offering power and versatility to mobile developers. In addition to powerful triple-A game tech that ships with the engine, it provides developers with direct C++ access so they can customise the engine as much as they need. And best of all, this all comes with absolutely no revenue restrictions.

Autodesk Maya

Autodesk Maya is a 3D computer graphics program that runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux and Apple Macintosh. And it is one of the best tools for developing 3D games for Android–if not one of the best 3D tools on the market. Many acclaimed games have assets created using Autodesk Maya, which include NASCAR Thunder Madden NFL 2004, and Halo 2.

Unlike many of the tools listed here, Maya is not a game engine or development platform, instead it would primarily be used in the creation of 3D assets and animations for use in a game.

Maya provides 3D animation software, modeling, simulation, rendering and Maya composition offers a complete set of features for 3D computer animation, modeling, simulation and rendering on a production platform with high scalability.

Maya is characterized by its power and potential for expansion and customization of the interface and tools. MEL (Maya Embedded Language) is the code that forms the core of Maya and through which you can create scripts and customize the mobile app.

jMonkey Engine

jMonkey Engine (jME) is another popular engine with lots of advance technology standards used by developers to create 3D games. This tool is written in Java and therefore runs on a multitude of OSes and platforms.

jME architecture is based on a tree-like scenes. This allows the organization of the game data in a graph of nodes, where a parent node can contain any number of child nodes, but a child node contains only a single parent. jME is completely open source, and is released under the BSD license.

photo credit: speedbug via photopin cc