Getting started with Java arrays

You might be wondering what happens when we have a game with lots of variables or objects to keep track of. An obvious example is our current project. As another example, what about a game with a high score table with the top 100 scores?

We can declare and initialize 100 separate objects/variables like this:

Bullet bullet1;
Bullet bullet2;
Bullet bullet3;
//96 more lines like the above
Bullet bullet100;

Or taking the high score table situation, we might code this:

int topScore1;
int topScore2;
int topScore3;
//96 more lines like the above
int topScore100;

Straight away this can seem unwieldy, but what about when someone gets a new top score? We must shift the scores in every variable down one place. A nightmare begins:

topScore100 = topScore99;
topScore99 = topScore98;
topScore98 = topScore97;
//96 more lines like the above
topScore1 = score;

There must be a better way. When we have a whole array of variables, what we need is a...