In the previous chapter, we have covered loading, managing, and releasing of external resources. To sum up, we have investigated mechanisms to ensure that textures, fonts, or sounds are ready to be used as soon as we need them. This chapter attempts to bring knowledge around a few key topics:

When writing a game, we invariably find the need to conceptualize our vision of the game into actual data structures. In other words, it is extremely important to have a clear idea of the scope of our vision. The world in our mind doesn't even have to scale remotely to what we consider our real world; it is a product of our own creation. It is well within our power, as game developers, to forge the whole world as a simple board game table, or an ant farm, or even scale up to a whole universe along with all the stars and planets.

The point is, it does not matter how our vision of the world looks, how small or big it is, or how realistic or abstract the concepts in it are, we will always want to represent that world in one or more data structures. For the reach of this book, we will apply these concepts directly to our own sample vision of a game, while leaving a solid background on the topic, for later implementation of new ideas and concepts.