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

Introductions to particles


In game development, you may have heard of particles. They are typically small 2D sprites or simple 3D models that are created in order to simulate fuzzy things such as fires, explosions, and smoke trails to add visual flair to your projects. This visual flair is sometimes referred to as juiciness. Made popular by indie developers Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho, making a game juicy makes it more enjoyable to play and increases the feedback the player receives by playing the game.

This is usually something worked on more toward the end of development of titles in order to polish the project and add more feedback, but it's a good example of how we can want to have many things on the screen at one time.

Note

For more information on juiciness and to watch their Martin and Petri's GDC talk on the subject, check out http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/178938/Video_Is_your_game_juicy_enough.php.

The reason that these objects are so simple is because they are spawned hundreds...