Game Development Patterns and Best Practices

The State pattern explained

The State pattern is a way to allow a game object to change its behavior and functionality in response to different stimuli within the game, especially when a variable or a condition within that object changes, as those changes may trigger a change in state. The state of an object is managed by some context (commonly referred to in the game industry as a machine), but the states tell the machine when to change states and thereby functionality. The State pattern contains two parts: the state and the context. The context object holds the current state and can be used by the state class to change what state should be run, whereas the state object holds the actual functionality:

In the Mach5 Engine, there is a class ...