What makes a game tick? Special Issue - Buffy the Performance Slayer

Whether one is making a RPG or a strategy game, there usually comes a time where designers want to attach a bunch of stats buffs and debuffs to each and every object in the game. The game actors start small but eventually we want our characters, units, countries and monsters stats to be able to be affected by a mix of equipment, perks, area effects, difficulty settings and whatnot. And if we don’t take care, it might turn our game into buff recalculation simulator 2000. For those who never had design or implement a stats system, this might not sound like a very hard problem at first glance. After all, shouldn’t it simply be a simple struct with a bunch of values in it? It could, but it depends a lot on what your system can and cannot handle. Say that we want our actors to have a bunch of stats that can be affected by various sources as we mentioned in our intro paragraph. Let’s ask a few questions about the extents of our system. To cache or not to cache? First let’s get the most…