Chapter 13. The Front End

When a player first starts up a J2ME game, you need to present him with a splash screen (to get him excited) and then a series of menus for the various options you’ve made available. For Star Assault, you’ll let players configure the keys they want to use to control the fighter, as well as turn off (or on) features such as auto-fire, vibration, and drawing the background star field.

All these things combined are what you call the front end of the application. In this chapter you’ll look at how the application class becomes the primary driver for these elements, along with how to develop a robust menu system without requiring loads of precious classes. By the time you’re finished, Star Assault will look just like a real game.