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)

Implementing the game loop with a thread

Now we have learned about the game loop, threads, and try and catch, we can put it all together to implement our game loop.

We will add the entire code for the game loop, including writing two methods in the PongGame class to start and stop the thread that will control the loop.

After we have done this, we will again need to do a little bit more theory. The reason for this is that the player can quit the app whenever they like, and our game's thread will need to know so that it can stop itself. We will examine the Android activity lifecycle, which will give us the final pieces of the puzzle that we need before we run our game.

Implementing Runnable and providing the run method

Update the class declaration by implementing Runnable, just like we discussed we would need to and as shown in this next highlighted code:

class PongGame extends SurfaceView implements Runnable{

Notice that we have a new error in the code. Hover...