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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

Using arrays in the Snake game

In the Bullet Hell game, we declared an arbitrarily sized array of bullets, hoping that the player would never spawn too many. We could have used an array so big it would have been impossible to go out of bounds (but that would be a waste of memory), or we could have restricted the number of bullets, but that wouldn't have been fun.

With the Snake game, we don't know how many segments there will be, so we need a better solution. The ArrayList class is the solution we will use.

Understanding ArrayList class

An ArrayList is like a regular Java array on steroids. It overcomes some of the shortfalls of arrays, such as having to predetermine their size. It adds some useful methods to make its data easy to manage and it uses an enhanced version of a for loop, which is easier to use than a regular for loop. You can also use ordinary for loops with the ArrayList class too.

We will learn about enhanced for loops now as it is convenient....

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