Book Image

Learning Java by Building Android Games - Third Edition

By : John Horton
5 (1)
Book Image

Learning Java by Building Android Games - Third Edition

5 (1)
By: John Horton

Overview of this book

Android is one of the most popular mobile operating systems today. It uses the most popular programming language, Java, as one of the primary languages for building apps of all types. Unlike most other Android books, this book doesn’t assume that you have any prior knowledge of Java programming, instead helps you get started with building Android games as a beginner. This new, improved, and updated third edition of Learning Java by Building Android Games helps you to build Android games from scratch. Once you've got to grips with the fundamentals, the difficulty level increases steadily as you explore key Java topics, such as variables, loops, methods, object-oriented programming (OOP), and design patterns while working with up-to-date code and supporting examples. At each stage, you'll be able to test your understanding by implementing the concepts that you’ve learned to develop a game. Toward the end, you’ll build games such as Sub Hunter, Retro Pong, Bullet Hell, Classic Snake, and Scrolling Shooter. By the end of this Java book, you'll not only have a solid understanding of Java and Android basics but will also have developed five cool games for the Android platform.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)

Chapter 10: Coding the Bat and Ball

As we have done so much theory and preparation work in the previous two chapters, we can quickly make some progress on this one. We already have our bare-bones game engine coded and ready to update, draw, and track time down to the nearest millisecond.

Now we can add code to the Bat and the Ball classes. By the end of the chapter, we will have a moving ball and a player-moveable bat. Although we will need to wait until the next chapter before the ball bounces off the walls and the bat, we will also code the necessary methods in the Ball class so that this last step will be easy to achieve.

In this chapter, we are going to do the following:

  • Coding the Ball class
  • Implementing an instance of Ball in the game engine
  • Coding the Bat class
  • Implementing a Bat instance in the game engine
  • Adding movement controls to the Bat class

Let's start by adding our first object to the game to bring the ball to life.