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

The Observer pattern explained


The intent of the Observer pattern is to define a one-to-many relationship between objects. When the state of one object changes, all its dependents are notified. The typical names for the objects in this pattern are the Subject (the one), and the Observers (the many). The Subject will contain data that the Observers need to know about. Instead of the usual situation of classes requesting data from another (polling), our Subject will notify a list of Observers when the data has changed.

The terms Subject and Observers may seem a little confusing at first. However, this concept is very easy, and one that most of us are familiar with. When trying to understand the Observer pattern, think of a blog and subscribers. In this case, the blog is the Subject and the subscribers are the Observers.

A blog may be updated once a day, once a week, once a month, or even less. Readers of the blog have the option to check for updates as much as they want, however this can waste...