Hour 11. Managing Lots of Sprites

What You’ll Learn in This Hour:

• Robot trash collectors

• Building the example

• Simulating group dynamics

We have developed a lot of capabilities within the realm of sprite programming up to this point, but we still have quite a bit more work to do before attempting to create a serious game. At this point, you have learned more than enough to make a simple game. That wouldn’t be a problem at this point, and if you wanted to take a break now, as we near the halfway point in the book, to work on a simple game of your own design, now would be a good time to practice your skills up to this point.

We are going to learn about managing a large number of game objects, represented as sprites in this case. Some use the term entities to refer to a game object, so we would be working with an entity manager in that case. Although every game will be programmed differently to meet its design goals, there are some common programming patterns that tend to emerge in every game, no matter whether it’s as simple as Pong or as complex as World of Warcraft. These patterns are so common that they were collected into game libraries in the early years of game development, and later into what are today called game engines. We don’t have time to build a game engine for Windows Phone, but we can at least dabble in it and learn how a large number of game objects can be managed efficiently.