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Learning Java by Building Android  Games

You're reading from   Learning Java by Building Android Games Learn Java and Android from scratch by building six exciting games

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Product type Paperback
Published in Aug 2018
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781788839150
Length 774 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
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Author (1):
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John Horton John Horton
Author Profile Icon John Horton
John Horton
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Table of Contents (28) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Java, Android and Game Development FREE CHAPTER 2. Java: First Contact 3. Variables, Operators and Expressions 4. Structuring Code with Java Methods 5. The Android Canvas Class – Drawing to the Screen 6. Repeating Blocks of Code with Loops 7. Making Decisions with Java If, Else and Switch 8. Object-Oriented Programming 9. The Game Engine, Threads, and The Game Loop 10. Coding the Bat and Ball 11. Collisions, Sound Effects and Supporting Different Versions of Android 12. Handling Lots of Data with Arrays 13. Bitmap Graphics and Measuring Time 14. The Stack, the Heap, and the Garbage Collector 15. Android Localization -Hola! 16. Collections, Generics and Enumerations 17. Manipulating Bitmaps and Coding the Snake class 18. Introduction to Design Patterns and much more! 19. Listening with the Observer Pattern, Multitouch and Building a Particle System 20. More Patterns, a Scrolling Background and Building the Player's ship 21. Completing the Scrolling Shooter Game 22. Exploring More Patterns and Planning the Platformer Project 23. The Singleton Pattern, Java HashMap, Storing Bitmaps Efficiently and Designing Levels 24. Sprite-sheet animations, Controllable Player and Parallax Scrolling Backgrounds 25. Intelligent Platforms and Advanced Collision Detection 26. What next? Index

Scope: Methods and Variables

If you declare a variable in a method, whether that is one of the Android methods like onCreate or one of our own methods it can only be used within that method.

It is no use doing this in onCreate:

int a = 0;

And, then trying to do this in newGame or some other method:

a++;

We will get an error because a is only visible within the method it was declared. At first, this might seem like a problem but perhaps surprisingly, it is actually very useful.

That is why we declared those variables outside of all the methods just after the class declaration. Here they are again as a reminder.

public class SubHunter extends Activity {

    // These variables can be "seen"
    // throughout the SubHunter class
    int numberHorizontalPixels;
    int numberVerticalPixels;
    int blockSize;
    …
    …

When we do it as we did in the previous code the variables can be used throughout the code file. As this and other projects progress we will declare some variables...

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