Need some help on a game im making

Question

Making a game called Beetle however i got stuck when trying to display the players name in the main method. As you will see the variable playerName is supposed to be returned by beetleGameIntro method but i dont think it is because when i run it the dialog box is blank...also i played with the initializing of that variable and found out that if i take away the blank quotes and make it public static the dailog box shows "null" but i want to know why its not displaying the name entered.
public static void main(String[] args)
        boolean playAgain=false;
        boolean hasHead=false;
        boolean hasBody=false;
        boolean hasTail=false;
        boolean hasFeelers=false;
        boolean hasEyes=false;
        boolean hasLegs=false;
        int feelerCount=0;
        int eyeCount=0;
        int legCount=0;
        String playerName="";
        beetleGameIntro(playerName);
        JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, playerName);
        while(playAgain=true)
        System.exit(0);
    } // end main
public static String beetleGameIntro(String playerName)
        boolean seeRules;
        playerName=JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Welcome to the Beetle Game! "+
                                               "\n \n What is your name? ");
        seeRules=yes("HELLO "+playerName+".\n\n Would you like to see the rules (Y/N)?");
        if(seeRules)
            displayRules();
        return playerName;
    } // end method beetleGameIntro

Answer 1

When you call the method beetleGameIntro from your main method, what happens is that the contents of playerInfo in the main method (" ") is copied to the variable playerInfo in the scope of the beetleGameIntro. The variable in the beetleGameIntro is not the same as the variable in the main method. The following code does exactly what your code does right now, and might clear things up, but not fix your problem. You should try to fix it yourself so that you won't run into the same problem again :)
public static void main(String[] args)
        boolean playAgain=false;
        boolean hasHead=false;
        boolean hasBody=false;
        boolean hasTail=false;
        boolean hasFeelers=false;
        boolean hasEyes=false;
        boolean hasLegs=false;
        int feelerCount=0;
        int eyeCount=0;
        int legCount=0;
        String playerName="";
        beetleGameIntro(playerName);
        JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, playerName);
        while(playAgain=true)
        System.exit(0);
    } // end main
public static String beetleGameIntro(String unusedVariable)
        boolean seeRules;
        String playerName=JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Welcome to the Beetle Game! "+
                                               "\n \n What is your name? ");
        seeRules=yes("HELLO "+playerName+".\n\n Would you like to see the rules (Y/N)?");
        if(seeRules)
            displayRules();
        return playerName;
    } // end method beetleGameIntroI think you don't even want to pass a variable to the beetleGameInfo method, only store the result of the call in a variable in the scope of the main method:
String playername = beetleGameIntro(); // this goes in the main method