Game Development Patterns and Best Practices

Why inheritance hierarchies are inflexible

The idea that Players, Enemies, Missiles, and Medics should all derive from one base object is very common to programmers new to object-oriented programming. It makes a lot of sense on paper that if you have a Raider and a SuperRaider, one should inherit from the other. I believe this comes from how inheritance is taught. When you are first learning about inheritance, you will almost always see a picture similar to this:

Figure 3.1 - A typical inheritance diagram when learning to program

Many introductory programming courses are so focused on the mechanics of inheritance that they forget to tell you ...