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J2ME Game Development: Issues and Troubleshooting.(TM) -Life Cycle of a Game

by Massimo Perrone ( Hanami Solutions)

3.0 Life Cycle of a Game

Now that we've examinated main problems around compatibility between these devices we will develop our software on, let's take a look in outline at what will be the typical life cycle of our game.

The example given will be based upon Fight, a game that appeared in the USA thanks to AT&T and in Italy by way of TIM. The screen shots featured in this article belong to B/W and color versions of the game.

The game itself is a classic one-on-one beat-em-up where two fighters challenge each other on an horizontal ring. Both the main character and the villains he will face move and interact with each other.

3.1 How to build a structure to handle such a game?

First of all one must bear in mind that a MIDlet (and so our game is) during its life cycle pass thru three main states:

  • start;
  • eventual pauses;
  • distruction;
  • All the code related to these three states will reside inside their corresponding MIDlet methods, namely:

    startApp()
    pauseApp()
    destroyApp()

    Usually first one takes care of hardware initialization, to create an instance of the display to show the program on and handle all the drawing operations received from an instance of the Canvas class.

    Inside the pauseApp() method, we will show the options menu and allow thus to change game settings, read instructions and so on.

    Last but no least the destroyApp() method will be in charge of setting the resources free, remove unused objects from game, shut down the application and give back control of the hardware to the residing operating system.

    It can be easily understood that, while pause and destruction methods are quite similar between all games, content of startApp() method is the real core of the MIDlet and handles all key operations of the game by mean of the Canvas class and her internal methods. Amongst them the following are worth being mentioned: paint() method to draw onscreen everytime currently used frame, keyPressed() and keyReleased() used to handle pressure and release of the keys and run(), most vital of them, synchronizing all operations of the game.

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