Exploring Programming as a Game Designer

In game designing digital games, there is often a separation of concerns: a designer creates a document and a flow, and then artists, programmers, and etc. will implement such a design. I'm entirely solo so I don't really have this relationship to my own work. This has led to a problem where I would be extremely excited by a design, but then be very bored when it came to implementation. I was being creative on one side of the equation only, when in reality I could stand to be creative on both ends. 

When trying to learn how to implement ideas in digital games, I have always felt like I was making someone else's game when I would try and make digital work. When trying to learn anything about Unity or 3D game development, so much of the tutorial information is based in already existing games.  Questions like "how do I make a 3D character controller" would trace their design origins back to games like Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie. But if I wanted to make something different from those interactive tropes, I was out of luck. 

I wanted to learn how to better understand how to leverage the programmed form as a game designer. That meant I had to take a more serious look at  how to program. Beyond the implementation of specific features, I had to look at the actual way to program several features. With the goals of exploring the game programming patterns a little deeper, I proposed a study with my faculty advisor at The New School and began this work early in June.  I would spend approximately two weeks per major pattern that I would find and determine its utility to me as a game designer. And then I'd report it back to all of you reading this.

The first of that writing is here, with the Command pattern https://medium.com/dev-genius/a-game-designers-thoughts-on-programming-patterns-command-pattern-4f6329f9b30d

The rest of the schedule is as follows:

1. Command
2. Flyweight
3. Component
4. Observer
5. Event Queue
6. Ptotoype
7. Singleton
8. State Machine

These are the 8 popular patterns as far as I can tell (taken mostly from http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/), maybe I'll be adding more as time goes on!

The interactive supplement here is mostly for the record of my own experimentation, building on my knowledge but not necessarily as a single project.