Game Development Patterns and Architectures in JavaScript

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In the realm of game development, the right architecture and design patterns can make all the difference. This session delves into the world of game development patterns and architectures in JavaScript, offering a comprehensive exploration of the techniques and strategies used to create engaging and well-structured games.

This talk has been presented at JS GameDev Summit 2023, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.

FAQ

The game loop is a core feature of game development that continuously cycles through steps of processing user inputs, updating the game state, and rendering the game visuals. This loop runs repeatedly, allowing the game to progress and respond to user interactions and other game events.

Decoupling game logic from rendering improves game performance and flexibility. It allows developers to modify the visual aspects of the game without affecting the core gameplay mechanics. This separation also simplifies debugging and enhances the maintainability of the game code.

In a fixed time step game loop, each cycle of the loop takes a consistent amount of time, which stabilizes the update mechanics across different devices. A variable time step game loop, however, adjusts the duration of each cycle based on the processing load and other factors, which can lead to more unpredictable behavior but allows the game to better handle varying system loads.

Developers can implement decoupling by using separate threads or processes for game logic and rendering, ensuring that changes in one do not directly affect the other. Additionally, a messaging system can facilitate communication between the logic and rendering components without tightly coupling them, maintaining their independence and improving game performance.

The Entity Component System (ECS) is a software architectural pattern used in game development that organizes the game into entities, which are individual objects or actors in the game, and components, which represent specific attributes or behaviors of these entities. Systems then operate on entities that have a specific set of components, facilitating efficient and flexible game mechanics.

Game development patterns and architectures are crucial as they provide structured solutions to common problems encountered during game development. They help in making the game code more modular, maintainable, and extensible, which ultimately enhances the game's performance, scalability, and ease of management.

Olayinka Atobiloye
Olayinka Atobiloye
28 min
28 Sep, 2023

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Video Summary and Transcription
Today's Talk covers game design and architecture, including entity component systems, game loops, and decoupling game logic from rendering. Entity component systems are popular in JavaScript game development for representing games as entities and their components as behavior on data. Game loops control the flow of the game and updating its state, with different architectures like fixed time step and variable time step. Decoupling game logic from rendering improves performance and flexibility, allowing for independent updates and easy addition of new features. Having a clear separation of concerns in game development improves performance, increases flexibility, and makes debugging easier.

1. Introduction to Game Design and Architecture

Short description:

Hi, everyone! Today, I'm going to be walking you through game design and architecture. We will cover common patterns and architectures in game development, including entity component systems, game loops, and decoupling game logic from rendering. Let's start with entity component system, which is a popular pattern for game development. It represents games as entities and their components as behavior on data. Using the analogy of building a car with Lego blocks, the components represent different parts, and the entity is the assembled car. In JavaScript game development, entity component systems are essential.

Hi, everyone, thank you so much for coming to my talk today. My name is Olayinka Atobele and today I'm going to be walking you through game design and architecture. Before we start, I would like to give you a brief introduction of who I am. I'm a student of computer engineering at the University of Lagos. I'm also a software engineer, a technical writer, a GitHub campus expert. I'm very passionate about diversity and inclusion in tech. Basically, I organise events and programmes targeted towards that.

Today, we are going to be speaking about game development patterns and architecture in JavaScript. I'm basically going to be introducing us to some common patterns and architectures that can help us speed up game development in JavaScript.

So, what exactly are game developments, patterns, and architectures? So, they are basically reasonable solutions that you can use to solve some common problems that we face in game development. Game development can easily get bulky, and especially as you scale up your games, as your games become bigger and more powerful, it can get very easy for it to become more difficult to maintain, more difficult to expand or extend its features. Basically, what having good patterns and architectures does is that it helps you make your code more modular, more maintainable, more extensible and in the long run, you could even improve the performance of your game, how well it performs, how well users are able to interact with your games and how scalable it is, how easy it is for you to add other features or even on board new resources to your games.

So, why is it important? Like I mentioned earlier, game development is a complex task. It is challenging. It can easily get complex. Patterns and architectures, having good patterns and architectures in place will help you simplify the process of developing the games and will also help make managing the game more manageable. Also, it could even help you prevent some common mistakes, you know, having some bugs in your games.

So, what are we going to cover in this talk? So, we are going to start with...we're basically going to be covering some common and important patterns in game development. So, we are going to be talking about entity component systems, ECS, then we are going to speak about game loops, then we are going to be talking about decoupling, you know, game logic from rendering. So, now let's start with entity component system.

So, entity component system, ECS, is basically a popular pattern for game development. So, entity component system is a software architectural pattern that represents game as entities and their components as behavior on data. So, this had just big words, so just to break it down, I'm going to use an analogy. So, let's assume that, you know, a lot of us are probably familiar with Lego games, the Lego blocks, so let's assume that you are building a car with a Lego block, right, so you are probably going to have the wheels, the wheels, the steering, the body, all of those different parts, all of those different components, are going to be your components. So, basically, they just represent, you know, the behavior, it just represents, like, a particular part, like your data of your entire game, right, so your entire game and, basically, entities are just a collection of the components. So, when, let's say, you finish, you know, assembling all your different Lego blocks and you have a car. So, in that situation, like, where your car, which is basically, like, you know, a collection of the different components is basically, like, in this case, your entity, so, because it's just, like, you're assembling different components together, right. So, your different components that, basically, like, represent a behavior, like a particular data of your components, right. So, they basically just represent, you know, one single, you know, piece, so, like, one single data, one single behavior, and then your entity is basically, you know, a collection of some different components that, you know, maybe represent, like, a particular entity, a particular object in your game. So, just now to bring it back to game developments in the in the world of JavaScript, so, let's assume that you are building, let's say, a video game, right.

2. Exploring Entity Component System (ECS)

Short description:

In game development, entities represent objects in the game, while components are the data attached to entities. Systems are collections of entities and components that perform specific tasks. ECS promotes code reuse, supports efficient data access, and enables easy scalability. Entities are created and destroyed at runtime, and systems are updated regularly. ECS is popular because it separates behavior and data, making code more manageable. Code example: position and velocity components with a movement system.

In your video game, maybe you have a car that is moving or something. In that case, let's say, your car is going to have, you know, velocity, the speed, right, you're going to have a speed, you're going to have a position, like, where your car currently is at. All those two things are kind of your components, right, your velocity and your position, they are components. But the car itself, which is, you know, going to be like, you know, a certain car is going to have a velocity, is going to have a position, is going to have a color, the car itself is going to be an entity, because it's basically just, you know, a collection of different components brought together. So basically, that is the main concept behind ECS.

We basically want to separate, you know, different, you want to separate the different behavior and data in your games into components. And in that way, it is easy for you to, it is basically easy for you to, you know, pick any components that you need. You know, when building like an entity or to bring it down an object in your game, it's easy for you to, you know, just pick different components, you know, as part of the entities. And you basically like, you know, built a new, you know, a new object to your game, like straight out of the box. So, and basically, entities are unique identifiers, like I mentioned, and components are just data that are attached to the entities.

Now talking about systems, systems are on the other hand, is basically just a collection of entities and components that perform a specific task. So, just to, again, using that analogy. So, let's assume that in a situation where you have maybe, you want to perform a task, let's say in the case of a video game, right, where you have like a car, your video game and you want to basically, let's say, move the car. So, in that situation, the only component that you really need to perform that task is, let's say, position and velocity, right? So, in this case, you probably don't have any interest in, you know, maybe the colour of the car or how big the car is because they don't affect the particular task that you want to perform at that particular time, right? So, basically, what the system does is they are basically just like, sort of, functions that help you, like, separate, like, specific tasks and the certain components that are related for you to actually perform the task. And, basically, in the long run, what it just does is it makes it easier for you to, you know, manage your code, makes your code, like, more manageable.

So, and how, basically, how does ECS work? So, entities are created and destroyed at runtime by your game engine. So, entities are basically just objects in your games. You add components, your game engine adds, you know, or removes components from it at runtime. That is from your entities, right? And then your systems are updated at regular, you know, intervals, you know, depending on the operations that you perform or that the user performs within the games. So, why is ECS such a popular, you know, it's a very popular game development architecture, right? And why is that so? It is a good choice for game development because one, it promotes code reuse, right? I mean, like we explained earlier, you have, you know, specifically defined components, which means, like, you can easily grab a component and attach it to different entities, actually, not just one type of entities. You can you can easily create a modified game object. Like, basically, all you have to do is just, you know, you define game entity and just create a new one, attach some component to it. And it can also help to support efficient data access, just like, you know, separation of, like, all your data into well-defined components. And it can easily be scaled, you know, as your game gets bigger, you can easily scale it.

Just to add, like, a little code example, just to put some sense into what I've been talking about so far. So, in this example here, you can see you have, you have a position component, you have a velocity component. And your position component, you can see, like, basically, you just have your X and Y axis, right? And your velocity component, as well, you have your X and Y axis. And then you have your movement system. And those, okay, just going back. The components, like, you see, they basically, I'm not doing anything besides just representing a component.

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