Model… revisited…

Hi everyone, it’s Vlad again.

It’s 10:52AM, 30 degrees Celsius if you stand in the shadow and just a couple of hours ago I hit an issue with our current project. Basically static data regarding gameplay was becoming completely unmanageable. Before moving forward I decided to rethink and drew how my classes were organized.

Let me tell you what this is… Data and Gameplay are folders, packages in AS3 terms. Tokentype1, Tokentype2 and Constants are classes that hold data in the form of static functions and constants. LevelController, LevelView, TokenController and TokenView are classes that are either controllers or views of my gameplay objects.

This is how I’ve organized most projects until now, so what’s the problem? For starters, all games until now have only one token type. This game has two but it will have more. I was about to actually copy/paste a method from TokenType1 class to the TokenType2 class… you know how bad this is right?

On top of that a new problem was present for a couple of days. Some variables names, class names and query methods conflicted, not logically but in terms of what I was reading while coding. Building, IsBuilding, buildings, building and so on… variables like type, code and state also weren’t 100% clear.

So I decided that it was time to redesign and refactor before it became too nasty. Here’s the result:

I simply took the MVC pattern seriously and created models for both level and tokens. On top of that I changed all ambiguous variables, states and methods to be named consistently throughout the project.

The LevelModel is nothing more than the old Constants class. There’s no big difference for now except that when gameplay is closed and we move to other stuff, I’ll have to create models for all the other stuff instead of having all constants inside one “global” constants class.

The TokenModel is the big change! It holds all the stuff from TokenType1 and TokenType2 classes, but now I can guarantee that there are no duplication of methods, arrays and so on. Big part of this arrangement was to deal with the inconsistent naming of variables and so on.

I’m very happy with the solution, now, if you excuse me, I’ll get back to coding game functionalities.