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

Learning how iteration can improve your game and code design


While it's nice to imagine it to be this way, games never come fully-formed from the mind of a designer/developer. A game is made up of many different ideas from many different people. While in the past people could develop games with only a single person, now it's much more common for teams to be made up of many different disciplines and every game developer on your team has ideas, many of them good that can contribute to the final product that gets made. But with that in mind you may be wondering how does a game get to the final point with all those different changes made? The answer to that is iteration.

The game development cycle

Game development is a process, and different people have different names and/or phrases for each of these steps, but most people can agree that, for commercial game development, there are three main phases:

  • Pre-Production
  • Production
  • Post-Production

Each of these states has their own steps within them as...