The Next Step

I have the opportunity now that GraphViewer is nearing completion, to start planning out my next step. My next objective is to create more of a simple prototype of my game. This involves creating a basic game class to base the game off of. I have seen many ways of setting up a base game class, but the one that I find is most effective is the component model. Here is pretty simple explanation by Robert Nystrom. Pretty much it splits up the roles of a single object in a game. There is a separate graphics component, that draws everything to the screen, a physics component, that handles everything physical, etc. You can plug and play different components depending on how you want the object to act. I have sketched up simple plan for my game:

As you can see, the GameState object has several contexts (which handle the graphics/input/audio API), and and "Object pool" of entities. An entity is simply a "thing" in the game. It could be anything, a star ship, a laser, or even a timer. It is merely made up of components. Every context also has a pointer to each separate component. This is where it differs from Robert Nystom's model, allowing each context know about each entity's components. This allows for optimization within each context.