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 focused a lot on decoupling code. Since our game design is very likely to change, we want to make sure that our high-level modules don't depend on derived stages or components. That is why we should follow the Dependency Inversion Principle, which says the following:

  • 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.

In simpler terms, this means that all our code should be built around the interfaces. We used the example of our M5StageManager not being dependent on derived M5Stage classes. Since we want to avoid class dependencies like this, we learned that we should also avoid hard coding, including using calls to the new operator. In order to avoid direct calls to the new operator, we learned about three ways to make Factories.

The first method was the classic Gang of Four Factory method, which says we should create a hierarchy of classes...