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 Strategy pattern and the Decorator pattern


We saw that in trying to be more flexible with our game object, a lot of behavior was factored into the base class. We also said that it would be nice to attach a behavior at runtime and have it detach itself when we are done with it.

There are actually two design patterns that have the potential to help our design, the Strategy pattern and the Decorator pattern. The Strategy pattern is all about encapsulating sets of behaviors instead of inheriting. The Decorator pattern is all about dynamically adding responsibilities as needed.

The Strategy pattern explained

The Strategy pattern is about encapsulating a set of behaviors and having the client control the behavior through an interface, instead of hardcoding the behavior into the client function itself. What this means is that we want the game object to be completely independent of the behavior it uses. Imagine that we want to give each enemy a different attack and flight AI. We could use the Strategy...