Structuring game world entities and their rendering objects
- by keithjgrant
I'm putting together a simple 2d tile-based game. I'm finding myself spinning circles on some design decisions, and I think I'm in danger of over-engineering. After all, the game is simple enough that I had a working prototype inside of four hours with fewer than ten classes, it just wasn't scalable or flexible enough for a polished game.
My question is about how to structure flow of control between game entity objects and their rendering objects. Should each renderer have a reference to their entity or vice-versa? Or both? Should the entity be in control of calling the render() method, or be completely oblivious?
I know there are several valid approaches here, but I'm kind of feeling decision paralysis. What are the pros and cons of each approach?