A sweet engine for getting started with Android game development is the andengine 2D OpenGL ES engine. This is very simple and compares with cocos2d-iphone for iOS development in 2D with OpenGL ES. They both support a wide range of 2d techniques with an OpenGL renderer. Some great videos are posted on the andengine google code page showing a box2D example, multiplayer example and more.
Mobile games are on slower hardware, similar to later 90′s computers so native is a great way to go for 3d and 2d game development because of this limitation at the current time and well into the next few years. Take this time to learn you some native gamedev. andengine isn’t native directly as it is Java based but compiled with the Dalvik JIT virtual machine. Another way to go native on Android is the Android NDK which allows C and C++.
- andengine download at google code
- andengine examples at google code
- andengine blog
- Mercurial repository at google code
- cocos2d-android port of cocos2d-iphone with BSD license
- rokon android is another BSD licensed android game engine
The engine also has extensions that can be easily added and some great ones exist already.