Reddit mentions of Artificial Intelligence and Games

People talk about prototyping games a lot. Like, you have an idea so you build out a simple example so you can play it and see if it's fun on a basic level.

But what they don't really talk about, is prototyping code. It's hard to figure out how things fit together in a meaningful way if you don't already know the coding conventions or patterns that can help you build them.

As a self taught programmer whose work includes a good deal of coding now, I've gotten a lot of use out of building out small 'hello world' type examples of more complicated code structures.

Imagine you're trying to build a skyscraper, you wouldn't just try and build it straight out of your head, you'd follow a kind of miniaturized version of it, a blueprint. So that's what you should do as a programmer, make blueprints. Don't just make blueprints for your whole game, make blueprints for even the smallest sections of it if you don't feel like you completely understand it.

My wife is a senior-level project manager for a really large construction firm and her projects typically cost somewhere in the range of $500 million. When she's on the job-site supervising a part of the build, she doesn't refer to the blueprint for the whole project, she uses the blueprint for that specific part of the job. So if you're having trouble figuring out how to properly break a python game out into modules, don't look at coding examples of full games because you'll just find it overwhelming. Look for simple examples of python imports and module structure. But more importantly, build small examples of how that works using those examples to make sure it works how you're expecting.

Think of the game you want to make, and form some basic ideas about how it should fit together. Read up on programming patterns, game engine architecture, or artificial intelligence for games and whatever other topics interest you about game design. Make small code projects prototyping concepts that are interesting. I have a project folder on my computer that is filled with small examples of programming patterns, complicated data structures, skeletal game structures, and anything else that can serve as a blueprint for building something else.

So if you're reading and come across Entity Component Systems (ECS), and you think that theoretically sounds like a good way to build your game, don't start by trying to build a game using ECS. Build a prototype of an ECS pattern. Something really simple and instructive of how you would do it for a larger project, a blueprint.

For example, this is the actual code I wrote when I was prototyping one of my favorite patterns, the Service Locator.

class Service:
_audio = None
_graphics = None

@staticmethod
def playermoved():
if Service._audio:
Service._audio.play_footsteps()
if Service._graphics:
Service._graphics.animate_player()

class Audio:
def play_footsteps(self):
print("Pitter Patter")

class Graphics:
def animate_player(self):
print("Look at the player move")

audio_system = Audio()
graphics_system = Graphics()

Service._audio = audio_system
Service._graphics = graphics_system

Service.playermoved()

And if you read the description, you'll see that this example doesn't really fully articulate the pattern as described. But that's okay, because the point of the code blueprint is to experiment with implementing concepts in a way that works for you.