[JAVA][Beginning Java 8 Games Development]

Chapter 17 ■ Enhancing Game Play: Creating a Scoring Engine, Adding Treasure and an Enemy Auto-Attack Engine
Now let’s add even more realism to this auto-attack game play, by randomizing which side the Enemy sprite
emerges from, so that the game player does not know what to expect. Currently, we are alternating sides, so we need
to add a randomization of the takeSides boolean flag at the strategic place within our code. Let’s write this code next.
Randomizing an Auto-Attack: Using .nextBoolean with takeSides
Even though we set the takeSides boolean flag right before we exit our initiateAttack() method after completing an
attack, there is nothing that says we can’t set it again before we call an attack by setting callAttack equal to true in the
if(attackCounter >= attackFrequency) structure, which you can see I have done in Figure 17-54, using the following
Java statement:
takeSides = randomNum.nextBoolean;
Figure 17-54. Set the boolean takeSides variable to use a .nextBoolean() method call off a randomNum Random object
Now that you have set the takeSides boolean flag variable in this way inside the Enemy .update() method, you
can further optimize your code by removing the takeSides = true; and takeSides = false; statements, which are
currently located inside your if(onScreen && launchIt) else statement (reference Figure 17-45).
Since those alternating boolean values will now be subsequently replaced by the .nextBoolean() method call in
the if(!callAttack) structure, they can be safely removed, because the if(!callAttack) conditional structure randomly
sets these two boolean values. The result of this is that now the iBeagle Enemy Actor object will randomly appear from
out of either side of the screen, and the game player cannot anticipate where the attack is coming from anymore.
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