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)

Coding the PongActivity class

In this project, as discussed previously, we will have multiple classes. Four to be exact. The Activity class provided by the Android API is the class that interacts with the operating system. We have already seen how the operating system interacts with onCreate when the player clicks the app icon to start an app (or our game). Furthermore, we have seen how the operating system calls the onTouchEvent method when the user interacts with the screen, giving us the opportunity to make our game respond appropriately.

As this game is more complicated and needs to respond in real time, it is necessary to use a slightly more in-depth structure. At first, this seems like a complication, but in the long run, it makes our code simpler and easier to manage.

Rather than having a class called Pong (analogous to SubHunter) that does everything, we now have a class that just handles the startup and shutdown of our game, as well as helping a bit with initialization...