Game Development Patterns and Best Practices

It's easy to make exact copies

Here, the concept of a prototype doesn't need to be used with virtual functions. We may have a group of objects, for example, easy, hard, and insane enemies that we want to copy. These objects may be the exact same class type, but they could have very different values for health, speed, and damage. In this case, we have our prototypical example that we want to copy from. Of course, in this case we could also just use a copy constructor, but it is possible, as in the case of the Mach5 Engine, that the copy constructor doesn't exist.

Either way, since we don't need to create derived builder classes, we can add prototypes at runtime. Take the above example of the easy, hard, and insane enemy types. We could have ...