Game Design Patterns

Recently I decided to program a video game. I am an experienced programming with years of web development under my belt. Still, software development is a wide field and game programming is a totally new domain. When I started I knew I would run into some challenges; after all it’s impossible to learn something so complicated without a lot of hiccups. However I was surprised to find that game development lacks a lot of the resources found for other types of software development.

I went to indie gamer a forum where independent game developers can talk about all things related to the craft and asked those more experienced than I about best practices for developing a game only to get a muted response. One user even told me that there weren’t many established practices yet.

Personally, I think it’s shocking to see that the game community hasn’t started the conversation on game design patterns and practices. The PHP community, which consists of a relatively inexperienced set of developers, still has many sites dedicated to discussing web design patterns. Web and game development are both young fields, but I think it’s time for game developers to catch up. That’s why I’m starting a wiki dedicated to game design patterns. http://updownleftleft.com Hopefully this can help start the conversation on game design patterns.

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