CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidgridviewcanvastiles
Axarydax
Axarydax

Reputation: 16623

GridView with images vs custom drawn Canvas for Android memory game

Say I'd like to make a memory/pairs game. I have currently made a draft that works on a Canvas, and cards are drawn into a grid.

This works for my current basic version, but I'd like show do an animation (when the card is turned, it will flip around and scale to higher size; or when the match is found, the cards would rotate around and then go back. I can't imagine doing this on Canvas, I'd have to make a lot of timers and do the animation by hand, it seems overly complex for this simple task.

I think I could could subclass View for a control that would display a card, and then react to touch events for that control. It would also make drawing scaling of the images done by Android itself, and, most importantly, I could use Tween Animation for some effects.

My question is - would it be OK to use a View for each card in the game (I could have 5x6 or 4x5 cards), and arrange them in a GridView? Are there some pitfalls with this approach? Or should I continue with completely custom-drawn Canvas?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1661

Answers (1)

pheelicks
pheelicks

Reputation: 7469

For such a simple game you should be fine using a collection of Views. As you mention using Views rather than trying to do it manually you get access to a lot of nice Animation functionality for free.

It also makes implement the user interface a lot simpler as you can just add onClickListeners to each view to capture user touches. If you're drawing it all manually to a Canvas then you'd have to interpret the touches yourself and decide which card was touched etc. While this isn't too hard, then I think subclassing View is a better model and will most likely result in cleaner code.

As you are only going to have 30 cards, then I can't imagine you having performance issues either - if you were thinking 100+, then maybe you'd have an issue, but I think you're fine. Also, if I understand your game correctly, the majority of your cards won't be animating most of the time so that's yet another reason not to worry - if you ever run into performance issues with the animations you can easily save off all the unanimated Views onto a Bitmap (Canvas) for the duration of the animation.

Upvotes: 1

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