Game Programming Patterns

Robert Nystrom

Nov 2014 · Genever Benning

4.5

235 reviews

Ebook

354

Pages

Eligible

About this ebook

The biggest challenge facing many game programmers is completing their game. Most game projects fizzle out, overwhelmed by the complexity of their own code. Game Programming Patterns tackles that exact problem. Based on years of experience in shipped AAA titles, this book collects proven patterns to untangle and optimize your game, organized as independent recipes so you can pick just the patterns you need.

You will learn how to write a robust game loop, how to organize your entities using components, and take advantage of the CPUs cache to improve your performance. You'll dive deep into how scripting engines encode behavior, how quadtrees and other spatial partitions optimize your engine, and how other classic design patterns can be used in games.

Ratings and reviews

4.5

235 reviews

Darren Gilbert

February 19, 2018

Couldn't even get past the free sample version of this book without being bored and overwhelmed by its constant mention of game engines and coding examples, etc. I would rather be a conceptual artist, creating storyboards and production illustrations for a game than struggling with game programming languages... the exception being action script, used in Flash ( now Animate CC from Adobe)!

14 people found this review helpful

Loïck Jeanneret

October 11, 2018

This was the first time I read a book in the 5 past years and it was amazing, it has cool concepts and manages to keep you interested with small fun notes from the author. If you ever tried to make even a small game "from scratch" without using some kind of framework and know a bit of C++ you will probably fall in love with this book. I cannot wait to start a new project and try to apply some of the concepts presented in this book in the wild! I definitely recommend it to everyone who wants to try to write clearer code, even if it's not directly related to games.

117 people found this review helpful

Alex Barber

March 26, 2018

This is an excellent book documenting design patterns that are very handy in C++ (or similar OOP languages) game engine programming, and I'd recommend it to anybody in the field. That said, the book doesn't cover much in the way of modern C++ (beyond very basic C++11), so I'd recommend reading some literature on that as well. Also, to a very new programmer, this book is likely to give you a complex about CPU prefetch optimization. Don't worry about that until you're up and running.

119 people found this review helpful

About the author

Robert Nystrom has programmed professionally for twenty years, about half of which is in games. During his eight years at Electronic Arts, he worked on behemoths like Madden and smaller titles like Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure. He's shipped games on the PC, GameCube, PS2, XBox, X360, and DS, but is most proud of the tools and shared libraries he created for others to build on. He loves seeing usable, beautiful code magnify the creative ability of others.

Robert lives with his wife and two daughters in Seattle where you are most likely to find him cooking for his friends and plying them with good beer.

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