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Learning Java With Games
Chong-Wei Xu
Synopsis "Learning Java With Games"
The book defines learning Java programming as the goal and constructing video games as the programming target. The nature of the video games has a unique role in education, such as, experiential learning, inquiry-based learning, team learning, and so on. Games heighten readers? interests; promote innovative imaginations; and visualize the effect of programming efforts, which relives the ?tedious? feeling in writing programs. In addition, video games emphasize problem solving that engage readers to analyze, to divide-and-conquer, and to bundle multiple techniques together for solving new challenges.Due to the complexity nature of video games, reducing the complication in teaching and learning becomes an important issue. The book goes through analyzing a game story to find out objects and the relationships among objects with UML class diagram, to explore the dynamic behaviors of objects and the interactions among objects with UML sequence diagram or UML state machine, to outline the game project with pseudo codes, and to adopt progressive enhancement strategy for gradually building up the game.Meanwhile, the book arranges the example games and projects as text-based for covering OOP concepts and fundamental Java knowledge. And then it discusses the event-driven games with graphics for programming discrete action-event chain and action-event-update-repaint chain. Furthermore, it applies the game-loop to continuously drive the action-event-update-repaint chain to be sprite animation mechanism. Following this flow, the Java language elements are arranged from text to graphics and from static to dynamic. Readers will not only learn what the language elements are but also learn why the language elements are needed and how to apply them for solving real problems.After studying a rich set of projects, the book turns to build up a ?Three-layer Structure for Games? as an architecture template and a guiding line for designing and developing video games. The proposed three-layer architecture not only merges essential Java object-oriented features but also addresses loosely coupled software architecture.
