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

Starting the Pong game


If you don't know what Pong is then you are much younger than me and you should take a look at its appearance and history before continuing. We will use everything we learned about OOP to create a class for each of the objects of the game (a bat and a ball) as well as methods within these classes to make our bat and ball behave as we expect.

The game will have a controllable bat at the bottom of the screen and a ball that starts at the top and bounces around off of all four "walls". When the ball hits the bottom the player loses a life and when the ball hits the bat the player gets a point. The player will start with 3 lives.

Planning the Pong game

In the last project we laid out all the method declarations and most of the method calls right at the start of the project.

While we will have some methods with identical or very similar roles in this project compared to the last, we will need to learn some completely new concepts, in this chapter and the next, before we can...