Free Game Programming Patterns by Electronic Arts Programmer Bob Nystrom

Bob Nystrom, a programmer who worked eight years at Electronic Arts, has completed work on the book Game Programming Patterns. It is available for free at gameprogrammingpatterns.com . Bob Nistrom began writing the book four years ago. Most books on game programming, he says in the introduction, either reveal in detail some aspect of the creation of the game — the physics engine, graphics, artificial intelligence, or describe the process of creating a game in a particular genre from beginning to end. He really lacked a book telling about solving typical problems that a programmer faces, a book that is quite universal, not tied to genres or specific subsystems of games. And so he decided to write such a book himself.

“Game programming templates” can be read from any chapter, but first you should familiarize yourself with the introductory part, which describes the general issues of game architecture and the most commonly used classic design patterns from the “gang of four” in games. The story about patterns that are directly related to games is divided into four parts — patterns of sequence, behavior, decomposition, and optimization. All chapters are equipped with C ++ code examples, which, whenever possible, do not use the narrowly specific constructions and functions of the standard library, so that the code is as clear as possible to everyone familiar with OOP and C syntax, and not just C ++ programmers.

Now, in addition to the HTML version on the site, the book is available in sourceat Markdown. Soon, Nystrom expects to lay out an electronic book and release a paper version - but in any case, the book will remain in the public domain.