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

Summary


In this chapter, we covered a lot of best-practice information, which we hope will give you a good foundation when building your own projects in the future. We touched on why hardcoding values is a bad idea, in addition to making a number of other code-quality suggestions, to ensure that your code is easy to understand and easy to extend from in the future, when it needs to be.

We also learned how iteration is useful in game development, talking about the traditional game development cycle, with tips and tricks about playtesting and how it can be immensely useful when developing your projects.

We also looked into low-level and high-level programming languages, learning about how scripting languages run inside another program that we have to build into our project. They are not compiled but rather interpreted, and are generally easier to use and write code for than a compiled language, but come at the cost of performance. Depending on how complex your game is, it may be a good idea...