Book Image

Learning Java by Building Android Games - Second Edition

By : John Horton
Book Image

Learning Java by Building Android Games - Second Edition

By: John Horton

Overview of this book

Android is one of the most popular mobile operating systems presently. It uses the most popular programming language, Java, as the primary language for building apps of all types. However, this book is unlike other Android books in that it doesn’t assume that you already have Java proficiency. This new and expanded second edition of Learning Java by Building Android Games shows you how to start building Android games from scratch. The difficulty level will grow steadily as you explore key Java topics, such as variables, loops, methods, object oriented programming, and design patterns, including code and examples that are written for Java 9 and Android P. At each stage, you will put what you’ve learned into practice by developing a game. You will build games such as Minesweeper, Retro Pong, Bullet Hell, and Classic Snake and Scrolling Shooter games. In the later chapters, you will create a time-trial, open-world platform game. By the end of the book, you will not only have grasped Java and Android but will also have developed six cool games for the Android platform.
Table of Contents (30 chapters)
Learning Java by Building Android Games Second Edition
Contributors
Preface
Index

The Simple Factory pattern


The Entity-Component pattern along with using composition in preference to inheritance sounds great at first glance but brings with it some problems of its own. Not least of which it exacerbates all the problems we discussed in Chapter 18, Introduction to Design Patterns and much more!. It would mean that our new GameObject class would need to know about all the different types of component and every single type of object in the game. How would it add all the correct components to itself?

It is true that if we are to have this universal GameObject class that can be anything we want it to be whether a Diver, Patroller, PlayerShip, PinkElephant or whatever then we are going to have to code some logic that "knows" about constructing these super-flexible GameObject instances and composes them with the correct components. But adding all this code into the class itself would make it exceptionally unwieldy and defeat the entire reason for using the Entity-Component pattern...