Animation architecture pattern

Question

I'm writing a game project as a hobby, and am looking for some architecural advice about how best to organize my game objects and their various animations.

For example, I have a class called Wizard, and a class called Dragon. A Wizard has, at least, 10 different specific animations associated with it, depending on its state, and the same for Dragon.

So my question is this: is there a standard pattern for organizing these sorts of objects so that it is efficient and easy to extend (i.e. it should be easy to add new animations and new objects)?

I have various ideas about how to move forward on this, but I don't want to get this wrong since it is such an important part of the game architecture. It seems easy to get this working for a small game, but I am afraid of unmanageable complexity as it gets bigger.

Answer 1

I suggest having an interface such as "Character", which defines what all of these entities should be able to do. Then your Dragon and Wizard classes are just implementations.

Another route is to have a Base class from which you extend from and use this to control the "hierarchical sprawl" associated with large projects, by drawing out a hierarchy of your objects and identifying extended base classes.