Game Objects and the Game Loop

In this chapter, we will begin to put the framework of a game into place. All games have game objects and a game loop. A game loop exists in every game ever written. Some tools, such as Unity, do their best to abstract away the game loop so that the developer does not necessarily need to know it is there, but even in these cases it still is. All games must take some control over the rendering capabilities of the operating system or hardware it is running on and draw images out to the screen while the game is running. All of the work of the game is done within a big loop. Game objects can be either an instance of classes in the case of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) languages such as C++, or in the case of procedural languages such as C, they could be loose collections of variables or structures. In this chapter, we will be learning how to design a game loop and some early versions of our game objects from within C++ compiled into WebAssembly.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Game loops
• Object pooling
• Player game object
• Enemy game object
• Projectiles