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 problems with using design patterns in games


Unfortunately, there are also some issues that may come into play from using design patterns exactly as described. It's often said that the fastest executing code is the code that is never called, and using design patterns will typically require you to add more code to your project than what you would have done otherwise. This will have a performance cost as well, as there will likely need to be more calculations done whenever you're using a part of your engine.

For instance, using some principles will cause some classes that you write to become extremely bloated with extra code. Design patterns are another form of complexity to add to your project. If the problem itself is simple, it can be a much better idea to focus on the simpler solutions before going straight into implementing a design pattern just because you have heard of it.

Sometimes it's better to follow the simple rule of K.I.S.S. and remember that it is the knowledge of the pattern that holds the most important value, not using the pattern itself.