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)

Using arrays in the Snake game

In the Bullet Hell game, we declared an arbitrarily sized array of bullets, hoping that the player would never spawn too many. We could have used an array so big it would have been impossible to go out of bounds (but that would be a waste of memory), or we could have restricted the number of bullets, but that wouldn't have been fun.

With the Snake game, we don't know how many segments there will be, so we need a better solution. The ArrayList class is the solution we will use.

Understanding ArrayList class

An ArrayList is like a regular Java array on steroids. It overcomes some of the shortfalls of arrays, such as having to predetermine their size. It adds some useful methods to make its data easy to manage and it uses an enhanced version of a for loop, which is easier to use than a regular for loop. You can also use ordinary for loops with the ArrayList class too.

We will learn about enhanced for loops now as it is convenient....