[JAVA][Beginning Java 8 Games Development]

Chapter 17 ■ Enhancing Game Play: Creating a Scoring Engine, Adding Treasure and an Enemy Auto-Attack Engine
Figure 17-30. Create a conditional if using attackCounter inside the .update( ) method that calls initiateAttack( ) method
Most of this “auto-attack” code we will be writing during this admittedly advanced chapter will leverage this
.update() method, which will be called from the .handle() method that runs our game from the GamePlayLoop class.
The reason I installed this .update() method that you need to override in every Actor subclass, is in case you wanted to
animate things in the game. If an Actor is static, the .update() method simply exists as an empty or unused method.
Attacking on Both Sides of the Screen: .initiateAttack() Method
The way to make your attack come from both sides of the screen is to have a boolean variable that can be set to right
(true) or left (false), which we will call takeSides. Declare this variable at the top of the Enemy class, and then create
an empty private void initiateAttack(){} method structure underneath your .update() method. Inside of this
.initiateAttack() method, create an empty if-else structure if(takeSides){}else{} to hold your attack programming
logic, so private void initiateAttack(){if(takeSides){}else{}} if you are into writing super compact Java
code (this is valid Java code, but does absolutely nothing thus far). If you follow the industry standard Java 8 code
formatting practices, the Java method body that you would use to implement this empty infrastructure can be seen in
Figure 17-31, and should look like the following:
boolean takeSides = false;
private void initiateAttack() {
if(takeSides) {
// Empty Statement
} else { // Empty Statement }
}
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