Taipei Ludographic
Game Design Workshop

Symbolic Theory of Game Design
Extensive Theoretical Model

Implementation

Game Software design approaches

The process

Class design for games

• Map inter-relationship to object behaviours in the real world
• Realtime loop fundamental to design
• Passive and active objects define which direction for peer class calls
  • eg baseball

pitcher.pitch(ball); // pitcher controls ball - works well
ball.pitchedby(pitcher); // ball is telling pitcher what to do!!

Bottlenecks

• collisions
• writing to the screen
• design game classes to avoid object method passing and virtual funcs/runtime binding in these processes
  • eg derive all classes from static 'collision map' to optimise collmap tests

Tweaking

• design code with 'difficulty' variables that are not co-dependent
• eg sprite_speed and game_speed separated so can be tweaked individually

Developing a game in java

• java Graphics class
• clipRects are nested
  • use g.create() to make new graphics device with no clipping
• no 'blit' function
  • use g.drawImage()
• Netscape doesn't automatically pass events
  • ask user to click in applet as part of design
• my cSprite class
• MediaTracker class
• native libraries
• Event model
• Use final specifier where possible to allow inlining
• Threads and performance

back to online games

Email Brian David Phillips at phillips@cc.nccu.edu.tw.