Enhancing Game Play: Creating a Scoring Engine, Adding Treasure and an Enemy Auto-Attack Engine - Beginning Java 8 Games Development - page 605

Making the Enemy Pause Before Firing: pauseCounter
Variable
To make the Enemy pause on screen, so that his shooting action looks more realistic,
and so that the InvinciBagel character has some time to try and tackle him (which we
are going to assign ten scoring points to a bit later on), let's add an integer
pauseCounter variable and a boolean launchIt variable at the top of our Enemy.java
class, as is shown highlighted in Figure 17-44 . Inside of the if(shootBullet) conditional
statement, after the shootProjectile() method call, place an if(pauseCounter >= 60)
conditional structure, and inside of it, set launchIt equal to true , and reset the
pauseCounter variable to zero . In the else part of the condition, increment the
pauseCounter by one using pauseCounter++ and then all we have to do is to imple-
ment the launchIt boolean flag into our initiateAttack() method and we will have an
Enemy character who takes his time when he aims and shoots at the InvinciBagel char-
acter. Your Java code for this if(shootBullet) if-else structure can be seen in Figure
17-44 , and should look like the following code:
if( shootBullet ) {
shootProjectile();
if( pauseCounter >= 60 ) {
launchIt = true ;
pauseCounter = 0;
} else { pauseCounter++ }
}