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

Why a monolithic game object is a bad design


When you break it down to the simplest terms, programming is about solving problems with code. Someone has an idea for a game or an app, and the problem that needs to be solved is how to describe that idea logically and correctly to the computer. Day to day, these problems usually come in the form of integrating code you wrote today with code written earlier by you or another programmer. When solving these problems, there is a constant struggle between doing things the easy way or doing them the right way.

The easy way to solve a problem means solving the immediate problem in the fastest way possible. Examples of this might be hardcoding a number or string literal instead of using a named constant, copying code instead of writing a function or refactoring code into a base class, or just writing code without thinking about how it can impact the rest of the code base.

On the other hand, solving a problem the right way means thinking about how the...