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 have demystified a lot of programming concepts in a quick refresher. We also started learning about our first design pattern, the Singleton, which is intended to allow us to always have access to a class's functions and variables due to the fact that there will only ever be one of these objects.

We discussed some of the typical downfalls of using the Singleton pattern, such as the possibility that objects could have multiple copies of them in the future, even if this is unlikely.

We learned about three different kinds of method for creating Singletons, starting off with the Singleton, then extending it and templating parts of it to create the curiously reoccurring template pattern, and then we saw a final all-static version of getting the same effect with minimal hassle.

Each of these methods has their own pros and cons, and we hope that you use them effectively, where they are relevant. Now that we've touched on the design pattern everyone is familiar with, we can...