I had been pondering some architecture issues after a day of refactoring and cleanup on an HTML5 game I’m building at work. Some common data/UI integration problems were bugging me, mostly just for the feeling of good separation, and I was about to post to r/gamedev:
I'm looking for advice on some minor architect issues in some HTML5 gamedev work I've been up to. My background is as a web developer professionally and a very trivial game developer as a hobby, and I"m only recently combining those. However, for lots of reasons related to the positioning of this game as *part* of a larger web project at work, it isn't a traditional <canvas> HTML5 game, but being done with a combination of DOM and concern-separated logic.
I'm having trouble figuring out how where to draw the lines between the bits that implement my UI and the bigs that run logic behind it, and how to keep them in sync efficiently. There are patterns for this, but I don't feel like my usual approaches make sense in a game context, so I'm looking for any advice you've got.
This is a card game, though the situation and question would apply to other types of games, as well. Right now, I have a new refactoring that gives me two parts: a card logic component, which shuffles the deck, draws cards, manages a discard pile, play states, etc; and, all the animations and transitions of the card sprites that I display.
BAM. Right there the answer smacked me in the face. And at that moment my first thought was how interesting it is for the act of writing out a problem to trigger the solution in your head, and this isn’t a new idea in the world of even for myself. It is, however, something I want to cultivate, both in myself and others.
Write more and often, about your projects.
I try to keep a development journal and used to do a better job of it. I’m going to look at setting up some kind of prompt to keep myself reminded through the day and maybe that will help. But, on to the solution here.
If I were responding to this post, rather than writing it, maybe this is what I would say:
Separation is great, but at some point these different parts just have to talk to each other. At least, something has to connect them. You’re going to be redundant if you model all the card state twice, both in your logic and your UI, so keep one of them dumb. That’s probably going to be the UI.
Those visuals need to respond to the state changes in the logic, rather than trying to mirror them.
That logic going on, tracking your cards moving between the deck and the hand and discard pile and whatever other states you have needs to allow some reponse to that state changing. When the logic draws a hand from the deck, the visuals need to know which three cards to slide across the screen into your hand. When you play a card, the player needs to see that happen.
Just fire a simple event when the state of a card changes in the logic, and let the DOM update accordingly.
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