Chapter 3. Tappy Defender – Taking Flight

We are now ready to quickly add a lot of new objects and some features as well. By the end of this chapter, we will be really close to a playable game. We will detect the player touching the screen, so he can control the spaceship. We will add virtual boosters to our SpaceShip class to move the ship up and down and increase the speed.

We will then detect the resolution of the Android device and use it to do things like prevent the player boosting off the screen, and to detect when our enemies need to respawn.

We will create a new EnemyShip class, which will represent the suicidal enemies. We will also see how we can easily spawn and then control them without changing any of the logic from the control part of our code.

We will add a scrolling effect by adding a SpaceDust class and spawning dozens of them to make it look like the player is whizzing through space.

Finally, we will learn about, and implement, collision detection so we know when our player has been hit by an enemy, as well as look at a graphical trick to help us with debugging our collision detection code.