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 overview


This chapter is all about separating the user interface and input from the actions they perform. We will learn about the Command pattern and how it can help us decouple our code. We will do this by first understanding the problem then looking at how this could be solved in a C style fashion. Then after looking at the Command pattern in depth, we will see how it is implemented in the Mach5 Engine.

Your objectives

The following lists the things to be accomplished in this chapter:

  • Learn the naive approach to handling input and why it should be avoided
  • Implement the Command pattern using function pointers and the class method pointer
  • Learn how the Mach5 Engine uses the Command pattern
  • Implement UI buttons within the Mach5 Engine