A relatively simple question ( I think)

Question

I'm pretty new to java. I've read a few books and been practicing the basics, and now I'm attempting to learn a bit more through the creation of a simple game. I've been able to get a lot of the groundwork down, however, I'm having trouble figuring out just how to do one of the simple things that I need.
This game is grid based, and each time a sprite moves it moves a uniform distance of one tile (around 20 pixels). I need to set it up, however, so that the characters don't just "pop" to each location, but that they actually use their walk animation to travel one square's worth of distance.
I'll post the simple code I tried, along with my thoughts on why it doesn't work, and then I'd like to know if I'm just going about it all wrong, and I should try another method, or there is an error in my code. My comments in the code explain what's going on (or supossed to be).
public void moveLeft() { //this method is called when the left arrow is pressed
    moving(); //this is a method that simply sets the sprite's animation to a walk loop and changes a couple status variables
    int x = getXPosn(); //get the current x position
    int y = getYPosn(); //get the current y position
    int newx = x - 20; //newx is where I want the sprite to end up
    for (int n = x; n > newx; n--) { 
        setPosition(n, y);
    stopLooping(); //stops the looping animation
}Now that seems pretty straightforward to me. I set the sprite to its walking animation. I get the current position, and tell it to go 20 pixels to the left, by decrementing 1 pixel at a time. Then, when it gets there, stop looping the animation.
However, what I end up with is the same as if the for loop is nonexistant and I just used setPosition() to "warp" the character to the new spot. The animation never takes place, and the sprite doesn't "slide" along the screen like I want. Is this because the for loop just processes so quickly from x to (x-20) that its unnoticable? And if so, how do I slow it down so that I can see this animation?
Perhaps I'm going about it all the wrong way, and there is a better method for getting at what I want. Any help would be greatly appreciated. For what its worth, I do know the moving() method,looping, stopLooping(), setPosition(), and all of that works. When I set it so that holding down an arrow key moves the sprite, it works fine. The sprite moves around, with the walk animation as long as the key is being pressed. That's just not what I need to do here. I just want it to walk a fixed distance, with its animation, from a key press.

Answer 1

well, it may have bloated my code a bit, but it works. I believe that once I get more of the game elements in place, I'll be able to simplifiy it, but I'm trying to take my time and get each part working solidly before adding more.
//I have a method that updates my sprite's x,y position each time through the gameloop by simply doing
locx += mx
locy += my
//where locx, locy is the current location and mx, my is the amount of movement (either positive or negative);
//Then, I needed 2 methods to get it to stop when I wanted.
public void stepLeft() {
       int x = getXPosn(); //returns the value of the current x position
       moving();
       setStep(-1,0); //this method sets the movement amount each update- (-1,0) means move left 1 pixel on the x axis each update
       moveLeft((x - 20)); //sends the value of where I want the sprite to end up when I'm finished to the other method I created
public void moveLeft(int x) {
       while (getXPosn() > x) { //this loop runs while the x location of the sprite is greater than the location I want it to end up at.
           isStill = false; //this is just a boolean identifier
       stopMove(); //A method that just stops the looping animation and resets the movement to (0,0)
}I tried to get it all in one method, but was having trouble, with using getXPosn() in the same method that I needed to check getXPosn() later. It kept creating infinite loops, because (getXPosn() - 20) would change based on the sprite's movement. So my workaround was to send it to another method for the loop.
As I said, I think this is a little bloated for what the code will be when I'm finished. I need to turn my background into a grid and I'm going to define each tile at some point. Then, I can go back and alter this code so that it just checks if its going into the boundaries of a new tile, rather than needing to use so many methods.