Game Development Patterns and Best Practices:

Book Preface

As your programs get larger, it is critical that you understand how to write code in such a way that classes and modules can communicate with each other in an intelligent way. Knowing how to write code that is clean and extensible is critical for the success of medium to large scale projects, especially if there are multiple programmers involved. We don’t want to spend time rewriting another programmer’s code because it is easier than figuring out how the original code works. Likewise, we don’t want other programmers to be confused by our code and rewrite solutions to problems that we already solved. This book explores the ins and outs of the most common ways to design code so that it can be understood, reused, maintained, and extended if necessary. These common design patterns will make communication between classes simple and clean. Whether you are using a commercial game engine or writing your own from scratch, knowledge of these patterns will make your game project more likely to succeed.

Each chapter of this book explores one of the most used design patterns for games. Togetherwe discuss the problems that we are trying to solve and how a specific pattern can be of use to us. Within each chapter, we also cover the pros and cons of the pattern so you are better equipped to know when to use it. This book is not a “cook book”. Using a pattern in your project isn’t as simple as copying some code that we provide. Instead of learning recipes for code, we are going to learn the fundamentals of how a game engine should be written. We will do this by looking at lots of code examples. As we said, these example, can’t simply be copy and pasted into any project. However, by understanding how these examples fit into the specific project for this book, you can implement them in any project.

What you need for this book

To write code, all you really need is a text editor, but for serious development you’ll need to use an IDE (Integrated Developer Environment). We use Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 and C++ in this book using a Windows computer but, the concepts taught can be used within any programming language as well. For those of you that do not have Visual Studio installed, but are using Windows we do go over how to install the free Visual Studio Community version and set it up with our project in ?????????, Introduction to Design Patterns.

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone who wants to learn how to write better, cleaner code. While design patterns in general do not require any specific programming language, the examples in this book are written in C++. Readers will get much more out of this book if they are already familiar with C++ and STL containers. The project that is included with this book was written and compiled using Microsoft Visual Studio 2015, so familiarity with that IDE will