(Abstract) Game engine design
- by lukeluke
I am writing a simple 2D game (for mobile platforms) for the first time. From an abstract point of view, i have the main player controlled by the human, the enemies, elments that will interact with the main player, other living elements that will be controlled by a simple AI (both enemies and non-enemies). The human player will be totally controlled by the player, the other actors will be controlled by AI. So i have a class CActor and a class CActorLogic to start with.
I would define a CActor subclass CHero (the main player controlled with some input device). This class will probably implement some type of listener, in order to capture input events. The other players controlled by the AI will be probably a specific subclass of CActor (a subclass per-type, obviously). This seems to be reasonable. The CActor class should have a reference to a method of CActorLogic, that we will call something like CActorLogic::Advance() or similar.
Actors should have a visual representation. I would introduce a CActorRepresentation class, with a method like Render() that will draw the actor (that is, the right frame of the right animation). Where to change the animation? Well, the actor logic method Advance() should take care of checking collisions and other things.
I would like to discuss the design of a game engine (actors, entities, objects, messages, input handling, visualization of object states (that is, rendering, sound output and so on)) but not from a low level point of view, but from an high level point of view, like i have described above.
My question is: is there any book/on line resource that will help me organize things (using an object oriented approach)?
Thanks
