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)

Getting dynamic with arrays

As we discussed at the beginning of all this array stuff, if we need to declare and initialize each element of an array individually, there isn't a huge amount of benefit to an array over regular variables. Let's look at an example of declaring and initializing arrays dynamically.

Dynamic array example

Let's make a simple dynamic array example. You can get the working project for this example on the GitHub repo. It is in Chapter 12/Dynamic Array Example/MainActivity.java.

Create a project with an empty activity and call the project Dynamic Array Example. Leave the activity name as the default MainActivity; as we will not be revisiting this project we are not concerned about using memorable names.

Type the following code just after the call to super.onCreate() in the onCreate method. See if you can work out what the output will be before we discuss it and analyze the code:

// Declaring and allocating in one step
int[] ourArray...