Using inheritance

The first powerful feature of OOP we will look at is inheritance. This feature can help us enormously when developing our reusable framework. Through the use of inheritance, we can share common functionality between similar classes and also create subtypes from existing types. We will not go into too much detail about inheritance itself but instead we will start to think about how we will apply it to our framework.

As mentioned earlier, all games have objects of various types. In most cases, these objects will have a lot of the same data and require a lot of the same basic functions. Let's look at some examples of this common functionality:

• Almost all of our objects will be drawn to the screen, thus requiring a draw function

• If our objects are to be drawn, they will need a location to draw to, that is, x and y position variables

• We don't want static objects all the time, so we will need an update function

• Objects will be responsible for cleaning up after themselves; a function...