Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
good idea to write down the design of the game. The
design
phase is actually one of
the most difficult tasks of game development.
Once it is clear what the game should do, the next step is to provide a global struc-
ture of the program. This is called the
specification
phase. Do you remember that
the object-oriented programming paradigm organizes instructions in methods, and
methods in classes? In the specification phase, an overview is made of the classes
that are needed for the game, and the methods that are in these classes. At this stage,
you only need to describe what a method will do, and not yet how that is done.
However, keep in mind that you do not expect impossible things from the methods:
they have to be implemented later on.
Once the specification of the game is finished, you can start the implementation
phase, which means that you will probably go through the edit-compile-run cycle a
couple of times. Once all that is finished, you can let other people play your game.
In many cases you will realize that some ideas in the game design do not really work
out that well. So, you start again with changing the design, followed by changing the
specification and finally a new implementation. You let other people play your game
again, and then ...well, you get the idea. The edit-compile-run cycle is contained
in a larger scale cycle: the design-specify-implement cycle.
2.7 What You Have Learned
In this chapter, you have learned:
•
how computers work, and that they consist of processors to compute things, and
memory to store things;
•
how programming languages have evolved, from Assembler languages to modern
programming languages such as Java and C#;
•
how a computer translates a program written in a programming language into a
language that the computer understands, using a compiler or an interpreter.
