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 on creating flexible, reusable buttons. Even though the UI may not be as fun to code or talk about as gameplay mechanics, to the player, it is just as important. That is why creating a good system to add and manage the UI in an intelligent way is so vital to making a great game.

We took an in-depth look at C++ function pointers and pointers to members. This is well known for being confusing and difficult. However, by mastering the techniques, we could create flexible commands that can call any C style function or C++ object method.

While this technique isn't always needed, in the case of UI, it allowed us to create an incredibly flexible system. Our UI objects and most commands can be set up and read from a file. If you were to create a level editor, you could easily use this system to create and read all UI buttons and commands from a file.

Now that we have a flexible system for creating the UI, let's move on to another problem everyone has when making games...