The high-level class that holds the state and controls the flow of the game is called PieNoonGame. Find the source in src/pie_noon_game.cpp.

Initialization

All game systems are initialized in PieNoonGame::Initialize(). Initializations that require a non-trivial amount of time to complete are performed on a worker thread in the background. Presently, these non-trivial initializations are limited to the loading of rendering assets.

Main Loop

PieNoonGame::Run has the main game loop. One iteration of the while loop in that function is one frame of the game update.

The frame length varies with the speed of the processor. It is clamped, however, between config.min_update_time(), currently 10ms, and config.max_update_time(), currently 100ms. To change these values, see Modifying Assets, and in particular, config.json.

When the game is playing, the game loop can be summarize as follows,

the game simulation is updated with GameState::AdvanceFrame().
the SceneDescription–a description of the poses and positions of the characters, camera, and environment–is captured with GameState::PopulateScene().
the SceneDescription is rendered with PieNoonGame::Render().
the GUI is rendered with PieNoonGame::Render2DElements(). Note that the game simulation and rendering system are isolated from each other. The only communication between the simulation and rendering occurs via SceneDescription.

State Machine

PieNoonGame has one high-level state variable that dictates the UI flow. The states and their transitions are described below.

kLoadingInitialMaterials – The rendering materials required to display the loading screen itself are being loaded. Nothing is displayed on the screenat this time.

When the initial materials have been loaded, the game transitions to kLoaded.
kLoading – The rendering materials and audio assets for the game are being loaded. Note that loading occurs on a worker thread via AsyncLoader. This allows the loading screen to be rendered by the main thread while the worker thread loads the assets in the background.

When all assets have been loaded, the game transitions to kTutorial if the player has never seen the tutorial before, or kFinished if the the tutorial has already been seen.
kTutorial – A slide show is displayed describing how to play the game. The slides are large textures, so to save on memory, we only read a couple slides in advance, and unload a slide as soon as it stops being displayed.

After the slide show, we transition to kFinished.
kFinished – The menu is display. Users can log in to Google Play Games, view achievements and leaderboards, see the license and about texts, rewatch the tutorial, or start playing the game.

The AI characters play the game in the background.

If the tutorial is selected, the game transitions to kTutorial.

If "Start!" is selected, the game transitions to kJoining for multi-player games, or kPlaying for single player games. A game is single player if it is started via the touch screen.

If the back button is selected, the game exits.
kJoining – The game counts down to game start. During the countdown, players can join the game by triggering any input on their controller. When joining, the player's character will jump, change color, and sparkle. This is intended to let the player see which character he or she is playing.

Once the countdown completes, the game transitions to kPlaying.
kPlaying – The game is active.

Once all the user controlled characters have been eliminated from the game, or there is only one or no characters left, the game transitions to the kFinished state.

If the back button (or 'p' on the keyboard) is pressed, or if the game is interrupted (e.g. it is minimized), the game transitions to the kPaused state.
kPaused – The game is paused and the pause menu is displayed.

If the back button is pressed, the game exits. If 'resume' is selected, the game transitions back to kPlaying.

Configuration

Game constants are kept in configuration files in JSON format. The configuration files are in the src/rawasset directory.

config.json – majority of game constants
character_state_machine_def.json – game rules and character animations
buses.json – sound bus configuration
sound_assets.json – mapping of sound files

The JSON file formats are defined in corresponding FlatBuffer schemas (.fbs files). These schemas are in the src/flatbufferschemas directory.

The JSON files are compiled by the asset pipeline into bin files with the command make assets. This command runs flatc to convert config.fbs with config.fbs into config.bin, for instance.

See Modifying Assets for further details.