When I started working on the 10.000 game, I had some ideas and concepts I wanted to try out when building the model. I’d like to share some of my thoughts on the process and the product.<\/p>\n
What is the objective of the model?<\/strong> What is the tradeoff?<\/em> I can’t say for sure, but I guess that if I had merged the model and UI and didn’t care about the benefits that the seperation gives, I could probably have saved 10 hours divided evenly between designing and programming, which equates to something like a 15% reduction. This is of course my ad hoc estimate based on the size and complexity of the game and it’s rules. I don’t think you could use this as a generic rule \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Encapsulation vs. performance<\/em> What benefits did this give after release?<\/strong> So I think my bottom line is; Solid design and good programming practices saves time in the long run. When I started working on the 10.000 game, I had some ideas and concepts I wanted to try out when building the model. I’d like to share some of my thoughts on the process and the product. What is the … Continue reading
\nMy goal with the model was to make a clear separation between the logic and state of the game and the user interface. The benefits I was hoping to achieve was first and foremost a division of the task at hand, by dividing the application into a user interface part and a model part. Secondly making it easier to swap UIs, by decoupling it from the model, in case I’d redesign the UI later on. Thirdly I wanted to encapsulate the variables that stored the state of the game, thereby making sure rules would be enforced and thus keeping the model in a valid state all the time.
\nA lot of this stems from the teachings and common programming practices like the MVC architectural pattern<\/a> and I saw no reason why this solution couldn’t be applied to the task at hand.<\/p>\n
\nAll of these benefits comes at a cost of course. During the development of the game I kept track of how much time I spent on the different tasks. I’ve given a short list below of the time allocated to different tasks (this only covers the initial version).<\/p>\n\n
\nAnother thing to consider is the fact that the encapsulation adds a layer of method calls that could be removed, if variables where directly accessed in the code. I read<\/a> that internal getter\/setter methods should be avoid, due to performance overhead. I’m guessing merging classes and then accessing variables directly would yield the same benefits.
\nI haven’t tried profiling the game, to see if there are any performance drops. The tests I’ve done on the UI haven’t had any issues so far, like an ANR<\/a> for example.<\/p>\n
\nAfter the first release I’ve made some improvements to the game. These have been bundled in three new versions. All of these have been rather fast to develop and I contribute a lot of this to the initial investment in time spent on design and model programming. Again, if I where to venture a guess I’d say that the time I could have saved on the initial release I’ve gained in the latter releases.<\/p>\n
\nIt has certainly saved me a lot of frustration \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"