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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 five exciting games

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Product type Paperback
Published in Mar 2021
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781800565869
Length 686 pages
Edition 3rd 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 (24) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Chapter 1: Java, Android, and Game Development 2. Chapter 2: Java – First Contact FREE CHAPTER 3. Chapter 3: Variables, Operators, and Expressions 4. Chapter 4: Structuring Code with Java Methods 5. Chapter 5: The Android Canvas Class – Drawing to the Screen 6. Chapter 6: Repeating Blocks of Code with Loops 7. Chapter 7: Making Decisions with Java If, Else, and Switch 8. Chapter 8: Object-Oriented Programming 9. Chapter 9: The Game Engine, Threads, and the Game Loop 10. Chapter 10: Coding the Bat and Ball 11. Chapter 11: Collisions, Sound Effects, and Supporting Different Versions of Android 12. Chapter 12: Handling Lots of Data with Arrays 13. Chapter 13: Bitmap Graphics and Measuring Time 14. Chapter 14: Java Collections, the Stack, the Heap, and the Garbage Collector 15. Chapter 15: Android Localization – Hola! 16. Chapter 16: Collections and Enumerations 17. Chapter 17: Manipulating Bitmaps and Coding the Snake Class 18. Chapter 18: Introduction to Design Patterns and Much More! 19. Chapter 19: Listening with the Observer Pattern, Multitouch, and Building a Particle System 20. Chapter 20: More Patterns, a Scrolling Background, and Building the Player's Ship 21. Chapter 21: Completing the Scrolling Shooter Game 22. Chapter 22: What Next? 23. Other Books You May Enjoy

The Ball class

Before we start hammering away at the keyboard, let's have a think about what the Ball class will need to be and do.

The ball will be drawn in the draw method of the PongGame class by the drawRect method of the Canvas class. The ball is square-shaped like the original Pong game. Therefore, the ball is going to need the coordinates and size to represent a square.

Shortly, we will see a new class from the Android API that can hold the coordinates of a rectangular ball, but we also need a way to describe how we arrive at and manipulate these coordinates.

For this, we will need variables to represent width and height. We will call them mBallWidth and mBallHeight. Furthermore, we will need variables to hold the target horizontal and vertical rate of travel in pixels. We will call them mXVelocity and mYVelocity respectively.

Perhaps surprisingly, these four variables will be of type float. Game objects are plotted on the screen using integer coordinates...

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