Redux Game

An expirement of going deep with redux in game development

Game

Asteroids, except everything can kill you, also there is friction and terminal velocity.

Demo

https://funkjunky.github.io/reduxgame/

Intro

I wanted to see how effective Redux was for game development. Looking online the most intensive use I could find of Redux would stop at the draw and update commands. Essentially people would use redux for a basic high level global store, while ignoring most of the reducing power.

Progression:

My first iteration Involved me using redux for handling:

• an input state
• entities states with flat physics states.
  • in the entities reducer I would pass acceleration to velocity, and velocity to position.
  • to do the derivitives I would call an action for each one.
• draw and update were handled by window.setInterval

My second and thorough iteration went for what i think was a more pure and correct approach to using redux for everything:

• Scrapped the input state. event listeners called actions to update state, and there is an action for key up and key down.
• entities states had hierarchical physics.
  • it looked like this: { acceleration: {x, y, _velocity: {x, y, _position: {x, y} } } }
  • naturally the acceleration reducers passed the velocity reducer it's state, and velocity passed itsself to the position reducer.
    • this was much more sane than grabbing and passing these values in the entities reducer. Much better encapsulation.
  • I added property getters and setters to make accessing position and velocity easier.
    • these accessors did not play nicely with combineReducers... I was forced to create no-op reducers and no-op setters to work around the issue.
• added a middleware for a tick action for updating
• added a middleware for raf, which would pass the store's state to draw.
• separated actions and constants and cleaned up the structure a lot
• added a few tests as proof of concept.

Conclusion:

• having an action fired every tick is too much noise when debugging.
• reducer physics is unnecessarily complicated. Physics rarely need to be gauranteed, so I think redux is overkill.
• Redux is just so sane and reasonable, it's worth further investigation.

Suggestion:

• use Redux for all discrete actions, but store the game's state outside of redux.
• use middleware to update the outside store every action.
• physics and constantly changing things like entity movement and rotation should be handled outside redux
• easy to quantify actions like creating a new entity, or leveling up, or doing a special attack.
  • also game state: ie. new level, level transition, map transition, score, resources.