Developing a Simple Game of Air Hockey Using C and OpenGL ES 2 for Android, iOS, and the Web

Some of you have been curious about what the air hockey game from the book would be like if we brought it over to other platforms. I would like to find out, myself. 🙂 In the spirit of my last post about cross-platform development, I want to port the air hockey project over to a native cross-platform code base that can be built for Android and iOS, and even the web by using emscripten and WebGL. Everything will be open-source and available on GitHub.

Here are some of the things that we’ll have to figure out and learn along the way:

• Setting up a simple build system for each platform.
• Initializing OpenGL.
• Adding support for basic touch and collision detection.

In the next post, we’ll take a look at setting up a simple build system to initialize OpenGL across these different platforms. Here are all of the posts for the series so far:

Setting up a simple build system

• Calling OpenGL from C on Android by using the NDK
• Calling OpenGL from C on iOS, Sharing Common Code with Android
• Calling OpenGL from C on the Web by Using Emscripten, Sharing Common Code with Android and iOS

Adding support for PNG loading into a texture

• Loading a PNG into Memory and Displaying It as a Texture with OpenGL ES 2, Using (Almost) the Same Code on iOS, Android, and Emscripten
• Loading a PNG into Memory and Displaying It as a Texture with OpenGL ES 2: Adding Support for iOS
• Loading a PNG into Memory and Displaying It as a Texture with OpenGL ES 2: Adding Support for Emscripten

Adding a 3d perspective, mallets, and a puck

• Adding a 3d Perspective and Object Rendering to Our Air Hockey Project in Native C Code

Adding touch events and basic collision detection

• Finishing Up Our Native Air Hockey Project With Touch Events and Basic Collision Detection

The code is available on Github, with each section organized by tags.