What's the right/standard way of achieving separation of concerns?

Question

Some background:

I want to start developing games, and taking some of the advice given in this site, I've started with something simple and familiar, such as pong, tetris, etc. I want to take as much time as needed to make sure that I have the basics right before moving on to something bigger. I have medium programming experience but I realize making games is a different thing.

I find myself wondering many things like should this be in a separate class? Should this module handle this stuff or is it better to let other modules have that kind of functionality? For example, the bouncing of a ball in pong, right now is handled in the ball module, but maybe it's better that some other module did it.

Right now I have different modules: one for the graphics, one for the game logic, and others for the objects (depending on the kind of movement required, not all the objects are alike). I know I am asking a lot, any tips you have will be very much appreciated.

Short question:

What's the right or standard way of separating the modules? What have you found most effective? Is it enough to just keep the drawing (graphics) and the logic separate? Is it necessary to have a lot of classes? (for example for the objects in the game, to handle the movement, etc)

Answer 1

The way I generally have learned any aspect of programming including game engine design is by reading books then making something crappy and realizing it was crappy because I ignored the patterns in the books. So I read the books again.

The books I have on this topic have been very helpful:

• Applying UML and Patterns (Craig Larman)
• Software Engineering for Game Developers (John Flynt)
• Game Engine Architecture (Jason Gregory)

The patterns as suggested in the comments, are very similar or exactly the same across all types of applications including games. Before you start worrying about game engine specific patterns, I would look into the more general design patterns. Pick a language you like and find a book called "design patterns in [language name]". Since the patterns are so similar, once you know them, apply them to a game like tetris as you've suggested and you'll start to see their benefits.