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

Product type Paperback

Published in Mar 2021

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781800565869

Length 686 pages

Edition 3rd Edition

Languages

Java

Tools

Android

Concepts

Mobile Game Development

Author (1):

John Horton

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Table of Contents (24) Chapters

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

Deploying the game so far

Before we can properly explain any of the code and learn our first bit of Java, you might be surprised to learn that we can already run our project. It will just be a blank screen, but as we will be running the game as often as possible to check our progress, let's learn how to do that now. You have three options:

Run the game on the emulator on your PC (this is part of Android Studio).
Run the game on a real Android device in USB debugging mode.
Export the game as a full Android project that can be uploaded to the Play Store.

The first option is the easiest to set up because we did it as part of setting up Android Studio. If you have a powerful PC, you will hardly see the difference between an emulator and a real device. However, screen touches are emulated by mouse clicks, so proper testing of the player's experience is not possible.

The second option that uses a real device has a couple more steps; however, once it is...