Game Development Patterns and Best Practices

The Decorator pattern explained

The purpose of the Decorator pattern is to dynamically add responsibilities to an object at runtime. The goal is to be a flexible alternative to creating derived classes while still allowing for extended behavior. What this means is that we can take our object and add decorations or, in our case, behaviors at runtime.

This pattern requires that the Decorator and our object are derived from a common base class so they share the same interface. Each Decorator will then layer itself on top of an object or another Decorator to create more interesting object types and effects. When a function gets called on a Decorator, it will call the corresponding function on the next layer down, eventually calling the function ...