Summary

In this chapter, we have completed all the code that will draw our game objects to the screen, control their behavior, and let them interact with other classes through collisions. The most important thing to take away from this chapter is not how any of the specific component-based classes work but how flexible the Entity-Component system is. If you want a game object that behaves in a certain way, create a new update component. If it needs to know about other objects in the game, get a pointer to the appropriate component in the start function. If it needs to be drawn in a fancy manner, perhaps with a shader or an animation, code a graphics component that performs the actions in the draw function. If you need multiple colliders, like we did for Thomas and Bob in the Thomas Was Late project, this is no problem: code a new collider-based component.

In the next chapter, we will code the file input and output system, as well as the class that will be the factory that builds...