How is a splash screen that is disposed upon user input meant to be implemented?

Question

I'm going through Gustavo Steigert's tutorials on libgdx, but I have a feeling that this is more of a design question, rather than specifically regarding libgdx. My question is regarding the splash screen. I can implement what he has in that tutorial without any errors, but I want to add a little extra. In every game I've ever played, the splash screen goes away when the user left-clicks or presses esc, so I'm trying to add that (strangely, I can't find any tutorials with splashes like that). So, I have this method in my SplashScreen class:

public boolean handleInput() {
    if (Gdx.input.justTouched()) {
        game.setScreen(new MenuScreen(game));
        return true; 
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}

At first, I tried to make that method return void and simply call splash.handleInput() in the render() method of the main Game class, Tyrian. However, that doesn't work, because once the splash screen has been moved on from, handleInput() will still be called on every render(), and the game crashes if the user clicks a menu button. So, I made handleInput() return a boolean and used this code in render():

if (onSplash) {
    if (splash.handleInput()) {
        onSplash = false;
    }
}

onSplash is a boolean inside the Tyrian class that is true by default.

Something else odd: when using the void version of handleInput(), the game will only crash if a button on the menu (the menu screen is the next screen) is pressed., and not if the screen is pressed. I am worried that the splash screen is never being disposed of (though my current solution does not seem to show that), because I can see from logging messages being printed to the console that the menu screen is being created upon every screen click, which is what handleInput() does. Also, if I put an else to that code above, with splash.dispose(); as a result, the game will crash.

This is such a common action in games, I would be surprised if there was not a common and cleaner accepted way of implementing it that I have missed.

EDIT: I have changed the handleInput() back to void and have used the instanceof keyword in my main game file. It's a cleaner solution, but I'm not sure if it's the best (it's an extra check on every render!).

SplashScreen.java

public void handleInput() {
    if (Gdx.input.justTouched()  ||  Gdx.input.isKeyPressed(Input.Keys.ESCAPE)) {
        game.setScreen(new MenuScreen(game));
    }
}

Tyrian.java

if (this.getScreen() instanceof SplashScreen) {
    splash.handleInput();
}

Answer 1

Take a look at this tutorial. It's one for AndEngine but I'd recommend it as I think it's design is pretty good.

I've been using this design and in my game you can also touch the screen to go to the menu quicker and it has never crashed before. The technique is actually, like you might've tried, to switch scenes and then unload everything from the previous scene.

I hope this helps! Let me know if it doesn't