I finished my GrowWithGoogle / Udacity Android Development class in less than a month, so I began fishing around for other projects to try out. A few months ago, I had implemented a full-featured, BlackJack game in Unity / C#. It was a UI-driven game and I felt comfortable that I had learned enough XML and Java to port the game to Android.

The original Unity / C# code is here https://github.com/sdocy/blackjack, project website https://sdocy.github.io/blackjack/

Highlights:

• Most of code actually ported quite easily.

• Even swapping the Unity button, text and image objects for XML button, text and image views was pretty straightforward.

• Getting proper game delays was trickier than in Unity, but it gave me a chance to play with Java multi-threading.

• I did not port support for splitting cards. Being able to display multiple player hands on a small mobile screen will require a new card layout approach.

• The absence of pass-by-reference in Java resulted in my creating a player class to be able to have Java methods that work on both the player's hand and the dealer's hand. This actually turned out extremely well. Not only could I re-use the code I wanted for both the player and the dealer, but it made the blackjack code feel much more streamlined. Go go OOD!