[JAVA][Beginning Java 8 Games Development]

Chapter 10
Directing the Cast of Actors: Creating
a Casting Director Engine and
Creating the Bagel Actor Class
Now that we have created the public abstract Actor and Hero classes (the Actor Engine) in Chapter 8, and some basic
KeyEvent handling in Chapter 9, it is time to put more of our game infrastructure in place here in Chapter 10. We are
going to create yet another Java class to manage our cast of actors, called CastingDirector.java (the Casting Engine).
We will do this so that we can keep track of the Actor objects on the game play screen that have been created using our
Actor and Hero abstract classes. It is important to know what game components (actors) are currently on the screen
(or stage, or set, if you like the film production lingo that we are using) at any given time (or level) in the game.
In this chapter, we’ll also need to learn more about, and use, the List and ArrayList classes as well as the Set and
HashSet classes. These Java “collection” classes will manage the List objects and Set object that we’ll use to track the
current Actor objects that are involved in the game play on the screen. We’ll cover these java.util package classes in
detail early on during this chapter, so get ready to learn about Java Array objects, and some other fairly advanced Java
programming concepts that may be a challenge for the beginner. However, they will be very useful for you to use in
your Java 8 game title development work process, so I have decided to include them in this book.
We will also want to create our first actor for the game, the InvinciBagel character actor, since I don’t want to get
too far removed from the code that we wrote in Chapter 8 without implementing it (using it to create an actor). We will
accomplish this by creating a Bagel.java class that will use the Java extends keyword to subclass a Hero.java abstract
class. This makes Bagel.java into a subclass, and makes Hero.java a superclass.
Once we have a Bagel.java class in place, we will then use the Java new keyword and the Bagel() constructor
method for the Bagel class to create a Bagel object named iBagel. We will load the iBagel object with some temporary
SVG data, at least until we get into how to create complex SVG collision shape data in Chapter 16 covering collision
detection. We will also pass an X and Y coordinate, to put the iBagel actor in the middle of the screen, and finally the
9-character movement sprite “cels,” which we first looked at during Chapter 8.
We will do this so you can start to utilize the primary data fields (variables, properties, or attributes) that we
installed in a public abstract Actor and Hero class infrastructure, which we so painstakingly (or, should I say, lovingly)
designed back in Chapter 8.
We will also be working in our InvinciBagel.java primary application class again here in Chapter 10, and will
create our iBagel Bagel (Hero) object in a new .createGameActor() method we will be coding, so that we can wire our
main character up to the GamePlayLoop class’s .handle() method. This will then access (call) the Bagel class .update()
method, so that we can start to control the movements for the primary hero for our game, the InvinciBagel himself.
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