A topic that we recently discussed in class is Strategy Design Patterns which is defined as a family of algorithms that are each encapsulated and made interchangeable. Strategy lets the algorithm vary independently from the clients that use it. It is best to use when many related classes differ only in their behavior and when you need different variants of an algorithm.
https://www.madetech.com/blog/design-patterns-strategy
I chose to write this week’s post on a blog written by Scott Mason which is also on Strategy Design Patterns. I chose this blog because Masson explains Strategy Design Patterns by using a popular video game, Overwatch as an example and shows how Strategy Design Patterns are needed to make the game more efficient. This blog stood out to me because of the Overwatch example since I’ve played the game before.
The blog poses a problem. In Overwatch, players have the choice of playing as 21 different characters, and each character has 3 different attributes unique to them. During the game, the user is able to switch between characters when they die, so the game needs to run smoothly.
Mason shows what a poorly designed code would look like, where you have a class for each ability, but create an if statement for all 21 characters. This would result in 63 different cases which is too repetitive.
Mason poses the solution which is to create a series of classes known as strategies, one per unique character, that defines how each of the characters implements their abilities. This makes it so the Player class doesn’t need to know the specifics of how each character implements each of their abilities, and we can just pass a particular character to it. The new code that’s shown in the blog cleans up the program significantly so that new characters can be added with ease by creating different strategies with the same methods.
This was a nicely written blog that explains Strategy Design Patterns efficiently because it thoroughly went through transforming messy, inefficient code to code that uses strategy and is efficient. And what made this blog more appealing to me was that it used a video game I play as an example, which made it easier for me to understand everything going on in the code. This won’t appeal as much to people who haven’t played Overwatch though, but I enjoyed the blog and it helped me understand Strategy Design Patterns even more than I did before.
Decode My Life 