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 Dependency Inversion Principle


The concept of avoiding concreate classes isn't new. Robert C. Martin defined this idea in The C++ Report in May 1996 in an article titled The Dependency Inversion Principle. It is the D in his SOLID design principles. The principle has two parts:

  • High-level modules should not depend on low-level modules. Both should depend on abstractions.
  • Abstractions should not depend on details. Details should depend on abstractions.

While this may seem like a mouthful, the concept is actually very easy. Imagine we have a StageManager class that is responsible for initializing, updating, and shutting down all of the stages in our game. In this case, our StageManager is our high-level modules, and the stages are the low-level modules. The StageManager will control the creation and behavior of our low-level module, the stages. This principle says that our StageManager code shouldn't depend on derived stage classes, but should instead depend on an abstract stage class. To...