Implementing Object Factories

We are now armed with a little XML knowledge but before we move forward, we are going to take a look at Object Factories. An object factory is a class that is tasked with the creation of our objects. Essentially, we tell the factory the object we would like it to create and it goes ahead and creates a new instance of that object and then returns it. We can start by looking at a rudimentary implementation:

GameObject* GameObjectFactory::createGameObject(ID id)
{
  switch(id)
  {
    case "PLAYER":
      return new Player();
    break;
    
    case "ENEMY":
      return new Enemy();
    break;
    
    // lots more object types 
  }
}

This function is very simple. We pass in an ID for the object and the factory uses a big switch statement to look it up and return the correct object. Not a terrible solution but also not a particularly good one, as the factory will need to know about each type it needs to create and maintaining the switch statement for many different...