The trade-off

With any implementation of a pattern or fix, there is a trade-off between what you gain and what it costs, and it’s important to consider the long-term effects when implementing patterns.

In many of the cases we are exploring, the gain is simplicity, readability, or a reduction in memory footprint, which should help your game to run smoothly. These are all key elements worth maintaining a good code base for. The cost is often time. Some patterns may take longer to implement, and, in some cases, having to refactor code to work in a specific way can use up valuable time.

The long-term effects, however, outweigh the initial time cost as the time saved later in development to build on top of or into existing systems will prove beneficial later in your game’s development cycle.