Book Image

Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners

By : John Horton
5 (1)
Book Image

Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners

5 (1)
By: John Horton

Overview of this book

Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world and Kotlin has been declared by Google as a first-class programming language to build Android apps. With the imminent arrival of the most anticipated Android update, Android 10 (Q), this book gets you started building apps compatible with the latest version of Android. It adopts a project-style approach, where we focus on teaching the fundamentals of Android app development and the essentials of Kotlin by building three real-world apps and more than a dozen mini-apps. The book begins by giving you a strong grasp of how Kotlin and Android work together before gradually moving onto exploring the various Android APIs for building stunning apps for Android with ease. You will learn to make your apps more presentable using different layouts. You will dive deep into Kotlin programming concepts such as variables, functions, data structures, Object-Oriented code, and how to connect your Kotlin code to the UI. You will learn to add multilingual text so that your app is accessible to millions of more potential users. You will learn how animation, graphics, and sound effects work and are implemented in your Android app. By the end of the book, you will have sound knowledge about significant Kotlin programming concepts and start building your own fully featured Android apps.
Table of Contents (33 chapters)
Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners
Contributors
Preface
Index

The game loop


So, what is a game loop anyway? Almost every live drawing, graphics-based app, and game has a game loop. Even games that you might not expect, such as turn-based games, still need to synchronize player input with drawing and AI, while following the rules of the underlying OS.

There is a constant need to update the objects in the app, such as by moving them and drawing everything in its current position while simultaneously responding to user input:

Our game loop comprises three main phases:

  1. Update all game and drawing objects by moving them, detecting collisions, and processing the AI, such as particle movements and state changes

  2. Based on the data that has just been updated, draw the frame of animation in its latest state

  3. Respond to screen touches from the user

We already have a draw function for handling this part of the loop. This suggests that we will have a function to do all the updating as well. We will soon code the outline of an update function. In addition, we know that...