[JAVA][Beginning Java 8 Games Development]

Chapter 6 ■ The Foundation of Game Design: The JavaFX Scene Graph and the InvinciBagel Game Infrastructure
Java Class Structure Design: Game Engine Support
Next, let’s take a look at how the functional structure of the InvinciBagel game will need to be put together under the
hood, so to speak, within your Java 8 game programming code, which is what this book is all about! There is really no
correlation between what the front-facing UI screens look like and what the underlying programming logic looks like, as
the majority of the programming code will go toward creating the game play experience on the game play screen. The
game instructions and legal and credits screens will just be images (ImageView) and will either have the text embedded in
the image (resulting in fewer Scene Graph nodes used) or composite a transparent TextView on top of the ImageView. The
high scores screen will take a little bit of programming logic, which you will do toward the end of the game development,
as the game logic has to be created and played for high scores to even be generated in the first place (see Chapter 17)!
Figure 6-2 displays the primary functional area components required for the InvinciBagel game to be complete.
The diagram shows an InvinciBagel Application subclass at the top of the hierarchy, creating the top level and the
scene, and the Scene Graph contained below (or inside) it.
Figure 6-2. Primary game functional classes and how they are implemented under the Scene and Scene Graph levels
Below the InvinciBagel Scene object, which is actually created inside this InvinciBagel Application subclass, is the
broader structural design for functional classes that you will need to code over the course of the remainder of the book.
The engines (classes) shown in the figure will create your game functions, such as game engine (gameplay loop),
logic engine (game play logic), sprite engine (actor management), actor engine (actor attributes), score engine
(game-scoring logic), animation engine (animation logic), collision detection, and physics simulation. You will have
to create all these Java class functions to fully implement a comprehensive, 2D game engine for the InvinciBagel game.
The game engine, which I call the GamePlayLoop class, is the primary class that creates the AnimationTimer
object that invoke the pulse events that continually process the gameplay loop. This loop, as you know, will call the
.handle() method, which will in turn contain method calls, which will ultimately access the other classes that you
will be creating to manage actors (sprite engine); move them around the screen (actor engine); detect any collisions
(collision engine); apply the game logic after collisions have been detected (logic engine); and apply the forces of
physics to provide realistic effects, such as gravity and acceleration, to the game play (physics engine).
From Chapter 7 on, you will be building up these various engines, which will be used to create the game play
experience. I will stratify chapter topics, based on each of these engines and what they need to do, so that everything is
structured logically from a learning as well as coding perspective.
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