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 8. Controlling the UI via the Command Pattern

In the last chapter, we dived deeply into the bits and bytes of computer memory so we could make our components more efficient and easier to debug. Understanding these details can be the difference between a game running at 60 frames per second or 30 frames per second. Knowing how to control memory usage is an important aspect of becoming a great programmer. It is also one of the hardest things about programming. In this chapter, we will take a break from low-level programming and look at something high level.

The user interface, or UI, is just as important as memory management or stage switching. You could even argue that it is more important because the player doesn't care about the low-level details. They just want a game that is fun. However, it doesn't matter how fun the gameplay is; if the UI is difficult to navigate or control, the fun level drops fast.

Can you remember a time when you played a game with terrible controls? Did you...