---
title: "Project Structure"
date: 2019-05-22T12:19:55-07:00
weight: 15
---

TODO: CREATE AN ENCOMPASS-FNA STARTER TEMPLATE

Structuring your project is a crucial component of keeping your Encompass development sane. Let's review how an Encompass project is typically structured.

If we look at the Encompass/FNA starter project, it looks like this:

(screenshot goes here))

The top-level of your game will be located in the (GameName)Game.cs file. 
FNA's top level functions are described as follows.

`LoadContent` runs once after the initial setup is done. I usually like to put my initialization and, you guessed it, content loading code in here.

`UnloadContent` is where you clean up after yourself so the game can dispose of itself properly.

`Update(GameTime gameTime)` gets called once per frame. It's where the update code goes. For Encompass there probably won't be anything in here except `World.Update(gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds)`.

`Draw` also gets called once per frame, after `Update`. All rendering logic should go in here. For Encompass you'll probably just put `World.Draw()` in here but there might be some externalities as well.

The rest of it is pretty straightforward. Put your sprites and sound effects and such in the **Content** folder. Define your components in the **Components** folder, your engines in the **Engines** folder, your messages in the **Messages** folder, and your renderers in the **Renderers** folder. (Again, we'll start getting into exactly how to define these in a minute.)

Finally, a quick note about **Helpers**. I like to use classes with static methods for common behaviors that will be useful for many different engines, for example a `Color` class with a `HSVToRGB` conversion function. Be careful not to abuse helpers. If your helpers aren't static, that is usually a sign that the behavior belongs in an engine instead.
