I will be taking a session on android game development soon at a development bootcamp. The audience there are going to be mostly newbies at developing games. So I am thinking about cloning a simple game on stage that would be easy to understand for them. I am going to be using LibGDX for this purpose. But I am totally clueless about what game to choose for this demonstration. any suggestions? ??? ??? ???
Breakout, the classic example for such (or Pong).
something like dig dug would be fun and fairly simple.
hmm, thought about making a pong or breakout clone. Pong would be really simple. Breakout not that simple, but still I have made that game before . Not sure about dig dug though. The destructible terrain ( or whatever that is) doesn’t seem that simple to implement. It gave me the idea for a pacman clone though 
Asteroids is extremely simple if they understand the basics of vectors and motion.
It really depends on expected audience. Tic tac toe can be hard for new programmers and boring for everyone else. Add networking and people without networking experience find it hard. Single player pong has the nice properly that its easy to extend game play.
There is always lemmings if you have good “animation” infrastructure available and they are competent at using said libraries.
TWL has a lemmings version as a demo.
Both use the exact same collision mechanics except you remove the block you hit and add points.
I had quite a bit of fun making Space Invaders, no idea how difficult that would be.
My first game was Space Invaders, thanks Kev for that tutorial.
http://www.cokeandcode.com/main/tutorials/space-invaders-101/
Start from there and move along in the series.
You should use an existing tutorial and walk them through it. That way you can point them to the rest of the tutorials after the session is over.
If you really can’t figure out a simple game to use, are you sure you’re ready to teach?
That’s a decent reality check, but I’ll assume the answer is “yes”, or “no but I can’t back out of this”.
I wonder more: what is it that you want the people to learn from your demonstration? That creating games involves writing code? I’m sure they already know that. I’d rather focus on specific topics in stead of “the writing of a game”. And that what you actually see would be the most logical choice for me: the basics of computer graphics and making stuff move and animate. That can already be an evening filling show since you can fill entire books on the subject.
You can learn with game from this book:
http://www.packtpub.com/learning-libgdx-game-development/book
Most basic tools and techniques reviewed.
Actually, I do think I am ready to teach . If you wait until you know everything there is to learn ( which obviously you can’t ever ) , then certainly you will never get to teach anything, right? It is not that I myself can’t think of any games, most of them seem just boring and not small enough to just finish up on stage and still make a lot of sense to someone very new to this arena.
Anyways , there is a change of plan and instead of coding anything , I will give a talk on how to start developing games if you are an absolute beginner ( by that I mean people who know how to code but haven’t delved into making games). I think that would be much better.
What specifically are you planning on telling them? How much time do you have with the class?
What are you telling them that a google search wouldn’t tell them?
I would introduce the basics of their options (Processing, Java, libraries like libGDX, other stuff like GameMaker and Unity). Then I’d probably use Processing to introduce a basic bouncing ball, then move on to Pong, introducing important concepts like debugging and looking stuff up in the API. Then give them a list of resources to consult for more information.
I would show them a presentation showing some example games and their mechanisms - in brief, though depending on the time available.