App Game Kit

So why AGK?

Well it ticked all the boxes that the Android Development Kit failed on and though is not free, is very inexpensive at less than £100 Sterling (around $110 US or a Million Euro Dollars - just kidding).

• It uses variant of Basic - my Strongest Language
• Everything is done by the commands themselves - no external libraries
• PC Testing is immediate and full speed.

Well the second one is not strictly true, AGK actually comes in two flavours;

• Tier 1 - (the one I currently use) is basic
• Tier 2 - is C++ and makes extensive use of libraries

Though Tier 2 does use libraries, the calls use almost exactly the same names as the Tier 1 commands, so learn those and that's all you need.

But it doesn't end there, as well as producing apps for Android, it can also produce them for numerous other platforms;

When you start a project, the initial template contains the following lines of code;

This will compile and run straight away and produce the following result.

In addition, if you have wireless networking, it can send the finished app over wi-fi to a specially created player app and test it in a closed sandbox environment on your phone.

You get to see your test code in full speed on both the PC and your phone at the same time.

For me it was pretty much a no brainer.