[JAVA][Beginning Java 8 Games Development]

Chapter 17 ■ Enhancing Game Play: Creating a Scoring Engine, Adding Treasure and an Enemy Auto-Attack Engine
Figure 17-32. Use a randomNum Random object inside of the .setTranslateY() method and use a period to call selector
The next thing that you will want to do is to declare an integer variable named attackBoundary that will be
referenced inside of your .nextInt() method call, so that you can change your Y axis (bottom of screen) boundary later
on if you wish, in one easy-to-edit location at the top of the Enemy.java class. The Java statement should look like this:
int attackBoundary = 300;
Now we’re ready to finish writing the Java code that flips the iBeagle Enemy Actor (sprite) so he is facing the
correct direction, and then we can test the code. It is important to write complex Java code in logical, digestible steps.
In this way, you can test your code as you write it, making sure that each component of the programming logic works,
before adding additional complexity. You will see this work process during this chapter, as we develop a robust autoattack
algorithm inside of the Enemy.java class. This auto-attack code can be used for any of the Enemy objects that
you create in the future; thus the code that you’re writing during this chapter will cover a plethora of bad guy attacks!
It is important to note here that since takeSides is boolean and can only have two values – true or false, we’ll only
need to implement a simple conditional if-else structure. This is because if our if(takeSides) condition equates to
being true, then we know that the false value (else condition) logic structure will handle the takeSides=false scenario.
Inside of both of these if{} and else{} attack logic processing structures, we’ll flip the sprite image around the Y
axis, remembering to set the isFlipH variable for future use, set the sprite X location, to one side of the screen or the
other, set the sprite Y location to a random height value on the screen and then set the takeSides boolean variable to
the opposite of its current true or false data value. In this way, the iBeagle Enemy Actor object will alternate between
the left and right sides of the screen. Later, we’ll use the .nextBoolean() method, from the Random class, to make the
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