The Entity-Component pattern
We will now spend five minutes wallowing in the misery of an apparently unsolvable muddle. Then we will see how the entity-component pattern comes to the rescue.
Why lots of diverse object types are hard to manage
This project design raises multiple problems that need to be discussed before we can start tapping away at the keyboard. The first is the diversity of the game objects. Let's consider how we might handle all the different objects.
In previous projects we coded a class for each object. We had classes like Bat, Ball, Snake and Apple. Then in the update method we would update them and in the draw method we would draw them. In the most recent project, Snake, we took a step in the right direction and had the object handle what happened in both the updating and the drawing phases.
We could just get started and use this same structure for this project. It would work but a few major coding nightmares would become apparent by the end of the project.
