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

Benefits of using the Observer pattern


At the start of this chapter we saw three problems with interacting gameplay code. As we said before, these problems aren't that big, but they creep up all over the place and can lead to inflexible code as the project moves forward. The Observer pattern solves these problems in a very simple way.

The biggest benefit of using the Observer pattern is that we can reduce dependency and coupling. By using the Push version of the Observer pattern, our classes can interact completely through interfaces, so they don't depend on each other at all. In the preceding example, the Player and Player Display are completely decoupled. This means that changes to one won't affect the other. For starters, this makes each class easier to test and debug because they can be worked on separately. However, this also means that as the game changes, these classes can change independently. This means the individual class can easily be reused within the current project or in separate...