Playing a death anim on an enemy that I want to remove

Question

I've been trying to find a tutorial on how to best make animations in Android. I already have some animations for my enemies and my character that are controlled by rectangles and changing rectangleframe between updates using a picture like this:

When I'm shooting my enemies they lose HP, and when their HP == 0 they get removed. As long as I'm using an arrayList (which I do for all enemies and bullets) I'm fine, since I can just use list.remove(i). But when I'm on a boss-level and the Boss's HP == 0, I want to remove him and play an animation of an explosion of stars before the "End-screen". Is there a preferred way to do temporary animations like this?

If you can give me an example or redirect me to a tutorial, I'd be really grateful!

Answer 1

You could have a special kind of entity that plays an animation right upon creation, and auto-deletes when done with it. Just spawn it when you boss' health reaches 0.

Answer 2

Can't you associate an explosion sprite to your boss and play it when your Boss_HP == 0?

Answer 3

Android provides an Animation API that allows you to manipulate the properties of an object on the screen over a time interval. See http://developer.android.com/reference/android/animation/package-summary.html for a description of the API and http://www.vogella.com/articles/AndroidAnimation/article.html for a good tutorial.

Answer 4

It's probably not the most elegant thing in the world, but I accomplish this in the game by making a simple conditional.

if (enemy.isDead() && enemy.getCurrentFrame() == enemy.numberOfFrames())
     //Remove enemy

I'm sure there are better ways to do this, but this gets the job done for me with minimal effort.