Now that we have begun to create some map locations and started to navigate through our world using our player character, we can start to plan out how we are going to populate this world with NPCs.
We will cover the following topics in this chapter:
The Entity Component System (ECS) design pattern
Using JSON scripts for defining NPC properties
Physics component with entity collision handling
Selecting NPCs for an interaction with the input component
Overall map design
Following the standard object oriented design (OOD) methodologies, we could just use the Entity class that we created as the base class for all in-game characters, including NPCs and enemies. The reality with this standard approach is that we will usually end up with a massive base class that tries to do everything, including wide and deep hierarchies that become difficult to manage. One disastrous side-effect is that when one tries to change one small property in the base class, the effects...