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)

Summary

In this chapter, we learned the ins and outs of variables, added all the variables we will need for the Sub' Hunter game, and initialized many but not all of them. In addition, we captured the screen resolution using some slightly freaky object-oriented magic that will become clearer as we progress. The last thing we did was output the value of all the variables to the logcat window each time the draw method is called. This might prove useful if we have bugs or problems as the project progresses.

We really need to dig a bit deeper into Java methods because once we do so, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities. This is because we can more easily use the methods of the classes of Android. We will then be able to make our own methods more advanced and flexible, as well as use some powerful classes such as the Canvas class to start drawing graphics to the screen. We will learn about methods in the next chapter and start doing some drawing in the chapter after that...