Game Code vs. App Code

Jeff Fulton has written a great article about optimized game code, including some pretty thorough performance tests. He also gives some great historical information about OOP trends in Flash gaming based on his personal experience programming games.

What makes Jeff's article rare is that you don't see a lot of game developers seriously considering and integrating OOP practices. There are performance hits associated with some OOP structures (getter/setters versus public variables, etc.) that turn a lot of game developers off. Someone that's just doing games doesn't always take (or think they have) the time to learn good system architecture.

Application programmers have no excuse. If you're building apps, you aren't concerned about performance hits that will drop your application from 90 to 60 frames per second. You could probably run your app at 30 fps and be just fine.

Applications also have potential for a more elaborate system architecture and an increased likelihood of revisions or updates by other team members. Good OOP code is crucial for those things. The only detraction to strict OOP practices in Flash is performance related and frame rate specific - and apps rarely come close to pushing those limits.

Before I get flamed by game developers, let me qualify that by saying that a good portion of any game should actually be considered application development. Typically a game is actually an application that houses a game engine. (Jeff essentially comes to the same conclusion.)

So really, nobody has an excuse. Game and app devs alike need to know good OOP practices. Gamers just have better excuses (in certain circumstances) for breaking the rules.