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)

The Ball class

Before we start hammering away at the keyboard, let's have a think about what the Ball class will need to be and do.

The ball will be drawn in the draw method of the PongGame class by the drawRect method of the Canvas class. The ball is square-shaped like the original Pong game. Therefore, the ball is going to need the coordinates and size to represent a square.

Shortly, we will see a new class from the Android API that can hold the coordinates of a rectangular ball, but we also need a way to describe how we arrive at and manipulate these coordinates.

For this, we will need variables to represent width and height. We will call them mBallWidth and mBallHeight. Furthermore, we will need variables to hold the target horizontal and vertical rate of travel in pixels. We will call them mXVelocity and mYVelocity respectively.

Perhaps surprisingly, these four variables will be of type float. Game objects are plotted on the screen using integer coordinates...