Beginning Android 4 Games Development

A Little Physics in 2D

In this section, you'll use a very simple and limited version of physics. Games are all about being good fakes. They cheat wherever possible in order to avoid potentially heavy calculations. The behavior of objects in a game does not need to be 100 percent physically accurate; it just needs to be good enough to look believable. Sometimes you won't even want physically accurate behavior (that is, you might want one set of objects to fall downward, and another, crazier, set of objects to fall upward).

Even the original Super Mario Brothers used at least some basic principles of Newtonian physics. These principles are really simple and easy to implement. Only the absolute minimum required for implementing a simple physics ...