Game Programming Patterns Book

I’ve been reading Game Programming Patterns by Bob Nystrom.

It’s available to read online for free, as well as for purchase in a variety of formats.

A good book for people who are writing a video game engine. I found myself agreeing with pretty much everything in this book.

Note - this book is about internal software design. It’s not about game design, or graphics, physics, audio, input, monetization strategies, etc. So you won’t be able to write a hit video game after reading this book. But if you happen to be writing an engine for a video game, this book will help you write a better one.

Edit – and I’ve finished reading it. It was a quick read, but a good one. I consider myself an intermediate level game developer. I’ve written a few simple games and I’ve worked on several other games. (For example, I’ve ported Quake to many different computers over the years.)

For me the most educational chapters were Game Loop and Component, although Bytecode and Data Locality were also quite interesting.

I like that the chapters have links to relevant external documents for further research.

I felt smarter after reading this book.