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

Summary


In the second and final chapter of the Bullet Hell project, we put the finishing touches on the game by adding timing and the Bob class.

We also dealt with initializing and drawing a bitmap to represent a game object for the first time. In all the future projects bitmaps will play a much bigger role and we will do things like move them, scale them, rotate them and even animate a running Bob from them.

With our new-found skills and experience, we can now learn some more important Java and Android topics like:

  • The stack and the heap

  • Garbage collection (yeah, that's a Java thing)

  • Localization to add foreign language support

  • More encapsulation to keep our code from becoming too sprawling

  • Collections

  • Enumerations

  • Saving the high score forever

  • Much more Bitmap stuff

  • And more…

We will cover all of this over the next four chapters while we build a classic Snake game.