Book Image

Game Development Patterns and Best Practices

By : John P. Doran, Matt Casanova
Book Image

Game Development Patterns and Best Practices

By: John P. Doran, Matt Casanova

Overview of this book

You’ve learned how to program, and you’ve probably created some simple games at some point, but now you want to build larger projects and find out how to resolve your problems. So instead of a coder, you might now want to think like a game developer or software engineer. To organize your code well, you need certain tools to do so, and that’s what this book is all about. You will learn techniques to code quickly and correctly, while ensuring your code is modular and easily understandable. To begin, we will start with the core game programming patterns, but not the usual way. We will take the use case strategy with this book. We will take an AAA standard game and show you the hurdles at multiple stages of development. Similarly, various use cases are used to showcase other patterns such as the adapter pattern, prototype pattern, flyweight pattern, and observer pattern. Lastly, we’ll go over some tips and tricks on how to refactor your code to remove common code smells and make it easier for others to work with you. By the end of the book you will be proficient in using the most popular and frequently used patterns with the best practices.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
4
Artificial Intelligence Using the State Pattern

Chapter 11. Understanding Graphics and Animation

Over the last 10 chapters, we have dived deeply into some of the most popular design patterns. The goal of each chapter was to understand and solve some common problems that everyone encounters when creating games. Along the way, we have created component-based game objects with flexible State-based, decision-making capabilities. We have created core engines such as the StageManager and ObjectManager using the Singleton pattern, so that communication between game objects, components, and engines is incredibly simple. We also looked at Object Pools and the Flyweight pattern, which allow our game to use memory more efficiently.

In this chapter, we will focus on graphics. However, we will not be focusing on how to implement a graphics engine. That would require more than a single chapter. Instead we will focus on concepts that need to be understood, regardless of which graphics Application Programming Interface (API) you use.

Graphics is a large...