Wonder if and how design patterns apply to games? Hear things like “cache coherency” and “object pools”, but don’t know how to use them to make your game faster? I’m here to help!

This pattern works by avoiding processing derived data when a subsequent primary data change would invalidate it before it gets used. If you find yourself always needing that derived data …

The Type Object pattern lets us build a type system as if we were designing our own programming language. The design space is wide open, and we can do all sorts of interesting …

It’s a particularly good fit for data in games where you often have one-off special entities in the game world. Think about bosses and unique items. These are often refinements of a more …

This feeling is exactly why people get excited about abstraction, modularity, design patterns, and software architecture. A well-architected program really is a joyful experience to work in, and …

You can find the Double Buffer pattern in use in almost every graphics API out there. For example, OpenGL has swapBuffers() , Direct3D has “swap chains”, and Microsoft’s XNA …

How it Relates to Design Patterns Any programming book with “Patterns” in its name clearly bears a relationship to the classic Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software …

The Subclass Sandbox pattern is a very simple, common pattern lurking in lots of codebases, even outside of games. If you have a non-virtual protected method laying around, you’re …

Noel Llopis’ famous article that got a lot more people thinking about designing games around cache usage calls this “data-oriented design”. How do you handle polymorphism? Up to this …

In this pattern, the game loops over a collection of objects and updates each one. Inside the update() call, most objects are able to reach out and touch the rest of the game world, …