Game Development & Engines

By the end, you can

• Describe the three phases of the game loop and explain why it polls rather than blocks.
• Calculate the frame budget for a target frame rate and explain what happens when it is exceeded.
• Explain why a fixed timestep with an accumulator is used for physics, and what the spiral of death is.
• Trace the fixed-timestep loop steps (add to accumulator, drain in dt chunks, compute alpha, interpolate render).
• List the core engine subsystems and state the role of each.
• Explain how ECS separates data from behavior and why contiguous component storage is cache-friendly.
• Describe the broad-phase / narrow-phase collision split and explain how spatial partitioning avoids O(n²).
• Model simple NPC behavior with a finite-state machine and identify when behavior trees are preferred.
• Explain authoritative servers, client-side prediction, server reconciliation, entity interpolation, and lag compensation.