Good afternoon folks.

I apoligize in advance for the extremely basic question, but I keep having a hard time with classes (very basic, I know)

I am a database programmer by trade (PL/SQL, Oracle, etc) and have been learning quite a bit of PHP for my job - I started looking into C# to get and have developed a few very basic applications for my company - so I have the very basics down...

I have always been interested in game programming, so I figured startign a small game project will force me to broaden my knowledge.

Lets say I want to create a very basic, small "game" that has a icon randomly walking around the screen. I would create a basic "NPC" or "CREATURE" class that contains all the very basic information that all characters in the game would have correct?

For instance lets say

HitPoints

Armor

damage

Then if I wanted to spawn say 5 of them, I would just invoke this class through a constructor 5x, correct?

Lets say I wanted to add a player character, I could use the same "Class" with creature and just add a few more details on it, that way I would not have to re-create the entire "class" from scratch, correct? Isn't that the general idea? I will expand on my question a bit but want to mkae sure I have the very basics down first before I move on.

You are thinking too hard. A class is just a lump of things that have a direct relationship to each other. You would define the class as an array to get your 5 objects.

You are thinking too hard. A class is just a lump of things that have a direct relationship to each other. You would define the class as an array to get your 5 objects.

You would define the class to be Sprite because it needs to be drawn on screen. You mean to define another class Game separately to store the objects in a list I believe.

The big picture idea of a class is re-usability.

You will a Sprite class to establish that this class will be updated and drawn on screen and have some idea of position and velocity

A Vector2D class(this is just a class that contains values of type double x and y to describe the object's position and velocity followed by methods for basic arithmetic (+,-,*)

A Collidable interface that establishes collision methods.

A GameComponent interface that establishes the idea of updating and drawing the objects

A Game class that loads your game.

Example code in Java:

The Game can also extends JPanel or Canvas instead. The choice is yours.

public class Game extends Canvas
{
 
}

public class Alien extends Sprite implements Collidable
{
 
}

public class Sprite implements GameComponent
{ 
 
private Vector2D position;
private Vector2D velocity;
 
public void update(long milliseconds)
{
 
}
 
public void draw(Graphics g)
{
 
}
 
}

public interface GameComponent
{
 
public void update(long milliseconds);
 
public void draw(Graphics g);
}

Example how to create one row of 5 different aliens using a for loop:

int offSet = 135;
// create a row of Aliens
 
for(int row = 0;row < getWidth() ;row += offSet  )
{
 
Alien alien = new Alien(row,0);
add(alien);
 
}