Hi guys.

I was wondering if any of you could suggest a good site or book where I can learn more about game architecture and patterns found in games.

I'm at the point where I'm well grounded in C++ and want to move on to creating my first game. The problem is that I've been trying to make my first game for quite a few times now and each time I scrap it because I feel that I'm not doing something as it should be done.

I want to know when inheritance will work and when the <object> component pattern will be better. Where should game logic be implemented? Should there be an external class that handles collisions and drawing or should every class draw itself?

These are just some of the questions that I have been struggling with.

Any help concerning the concepts used in game programming will be appreciated, thank you.

A good reading people often recommend is Game Coding Complete by Mike McShaffry. I've read it myself too and I suggest that it is a great one! It covers a lot of introductory topics on game development and game code architecture as well as some advanced ones. It has some great advice on how you can decouple your game's subsystems.

Another good one is Game Engine Archtecture by Jason Gregory. It covers a lot of ground on game engines but in a more abstract manner than the previous one.

There are no set rules as to how you code your game. That's up to you. You can do it any way you want really.

I have a copy of Game Coding Complete (4th Ed.) and have read about half of it (it's huge, nearly 1000 pages). The organization the authors describe seems pretty logical to me, and most of their recommendations on how to do things seem to be backed up with horror stories about what happened to commercial game projects that did it another way.

I want to know when inheritance will work and when the <object> component pattern will be better.

GCC covers exactly this topic pretty early in the book. I actually gutted my own project and rebuilt it after reading it; they make a very convincing argument as to why inheriting everything from a base object class will lead to trouble.

Game Engine Architecture seems pretty good too. I've only skimmed through it, but it seems good enough to be worth a buy. Just a heads up: they have a new edition coming out in October. That's the only thing keeping me from ordering a copy today, tbqh.

Thanks for the replies guys, I think I will definitely be buying GCC in a few days.

If you guys don't mind I would like to ask another question. I am in my final year of High school now and after I finish I want to study Computer Science.

Are there books that you guys could recommend that will be covered in a Computer Science course at a university?

My main C++ learning source was the C++ Primer 5th ed. Now that I am solid in vanilla C++ I would like to learn about sorting algorithms, hash tables,

trees and all those topics that are quite critical to software programming in general.

And please do give lots of suggestions, I would rather be spending money on books than wasting it on something else.

Thank you.

+1 Game Engine Archtecture.. This was on our reading list at uni!