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)

Reusing the Pong engine

Feel free to copy and paste all the code in this section. It is nearly identical to the structure of the Pong game. What will vary is the other classes we will create (Bullet and Bob) as well as the way that we handle player input, timing, updating, and drawing within the BulletHellGame class.

As you proceed with this section, glance over the code to notice subtle but important differences, which I will also point out to you as we proceed.

Coding the BulletHellActivity class

Edit the BulletHellActivity class to look like this next code:

import android.app.Activity;
import android.view.Window;
import android.graphics.Point;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.view.Display;
// This class is almost exactly
// the same as the Pong project
public class BulletHellActivity extends Activity {
// An instance of the main class of this project
     private BulletHellGame mBHGame;
@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState...