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 9. Decoupling Gameplay via the Observer Pattern

Wow! The last two chapters were full of pointer craziness. Those two chapters combined, cover what are probably considered the hardest parts of C++. While all design patterns deal with pointers and using virtual functions at some level, it doesn't get much more difficult than what was covered in Chapter 7, Improving Performance with Object Pools and Chapter 8, Controlling UI via the Command Pattern.

In Chapter 7, Improving Performance with Object Pools, we went very low-level into the guts of C++ memory. This involved casting and strange pointer manipulation that most people tend to avoid. In Chapter 8, Controlling UI via the Command Pattern, we dealt with controlling the UI, which is more high-level. However, we learned how to control C++ objects and their methods in a way that allows us to create flexible code, but can also be very confusing.

If you feel comfortable with those chapters, then you are doing great. If you felt that those...