Question on methods in Object Oriented Programming

Posted by mal on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by mal
Published on 2011-06-27T13:12:11Z Indexed on 2011/06/27 16:33 UTC
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I’m learning Java at the minute (first language), and as a project I’m looking at developing a simple puzzle game.

My question relates to the methods within a class. I have my Block type class; it has its many attributes, set methods, get methods and just plain methods. There are quite a few.
Then I have my main board class. At the moment it does most of the logic, positioning of sprites collision detection and then draws the sprites etc...

As I am learning to program as much as I’m learning to program games I’m curious to know how much code is typically acceptable within a given method. Is there such thing as having too many methods?

All my draw functionality happens in one method, should I break this into a few ‘sub’ methods? My thinking is if I find at a later stage that the for loop I’m using to cycle through the array of sprites searching for collisions in the spriteCollision() method is inefficient I code a new method and just replace the old method calls with the new one, leaving the old code intact.

Is it bad practice to have a method that contains one if statement, and place the call for that method in the for loop? I’m very much in the early stages of coding/designing and I need all the help I can get! I find it a little intimidating when people are talking about throwing together a prototype in a day too! Can’t wait until I’m that good!

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