Overview

The course spans 12 sessions, each building a classic game. Every session has one main topic, supported by a few related ones. The course project runs alongside, in your own time.

Session	Game	Main topic	Patterns	Also
01	Pong	The game loop	Game Loop, Update Method	delta time, input, drawing, AABB collision
02	Flappy Bird	Structuring the code	State (game states), Singleton	a core library (GARCore), textures & parallax, procedural generation, keyboard & mouse input
03	Snake	Assets as data	—	texture atlases, sprites & animation, fixed-tick movement, input as actions & buffering
04	Sokoban	Undo and replay	Command	levels as text files, rules apart from drawing, unit tests
05	Pac-Man	Changing behaviour	State, Strategy	State vs. Strategy, a second strategy for routes, testing each ghost
06	Super Mario Bros	The game world	Strategy (level makers), State (the player)	platformer physics & tile collision, debug drawing
07	The Legend of Zelda	Events	Observer	C# events and lambdas, an event queue, hitboxes, tweening, composition vs. inheritance
08	Angry Birds	Using a physics library	Adapter, Facade, Prototype	physics world vs. game world, contact events, destroying safely
09	Plants vs. Zombies	Components	Component, Type Object	game types as data, picking, testing a component
10	Pokemon	Scenes and UI	State (a stack), Service Locator	UI widgets, separating UI from game data, save/load
11	Geometry Wars	Components and systems	Object Pool, Flyweight	components vs. systems, dependency injection & testing with fakes
12	Vampire Survivors	Performance	Spatial Partition, Data Locality	profiling, data-oriented design, course recap

The Session Pages

Every session page has the same parts. Prepare lists chapters and tutorials to read beforehand. The main part builds the game, with exercises in between. Pong and Flappy Bird start from an empty project; from Snake on, you start from a working codebase, explore it and extend it. The Whole Game shows the finished game in one class diagram, and Summary lists what the session was about, with its answer to each concern in a line. Apply It to Your Project takes the session’s patterns into your own course project, and Check Yourself has short questions, linked to the exam questions they prepare you for.

GARCore

Reusable code moves from the individual games into GARCore, a shared class library that starts in Flappy Bird and grows into a small game framework, with screen scaling, input, sprites, animation, tilemaps, state machines and more. Deciding what belongs in the core and what belongs in the game is an architectural decision in itself, and it comes up again in every session.