My tentative feel so far on patterns in games is that they're more useful for understanding a design than for constructing one, since as you note pattern-oriented design tends to end up pretty messy. But if you have a design, it can provide a useful vocabulary for talking about what's in it, or how it differs from an alternate design.
I'm currently working on a paper trying to analyze the X-Com remake through design patterns, and it seems to be working reasonably well so far. The pattern language gives some hooks for talking about what specifically was kept or changed in the remake. However, for that project we're using more design-oriented rather than programming-oriented patterns, from this project: http://gdp2.tii.se/
I'm currently working on a paper trying to analyze the X-Com remake through design patterns, and it seems to be working reasonably well so far. The pattern language gives some hooks for talking about what specifically was kept or changed in the remake. However, for that project we're using more design-oriented rather than programming-oriented patterns, from this project: http://gdp2.tii.se/
(There used to be a book, but it's out of print: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1584503548/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...)