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 4. Artificial Intelligence Using the State Pattern

In the last chapter, we discussed the Component Object Model. Giving an entity a behavior is now as simple as just creating a new component and having that control the game object.

Whenever someone starts to make a game, they begin by writing gameplay code. That is the fun stuff. Everyone wants to see graphics and physics take effect on screen. Things such as a pause screen, options menu, or even a second level are an afterthought. The same happens for organizing the behaviors of a player. Programmers are excited to make a player jump and make a player dash, but with each new ability a player has, there are combinations that you may want to disallow. For example, the player might not be allowed to dash while jumping, or may only be able to dash every 3 seconds. The State pattern solves these problems.

By coding the Game State Manager first, the problem of switching to a menu or pausing is solved. By coding finite State Machines as...