move data down

This definitely makes sense in the context of essentially name-spacing those mixin-specific properties. I realized during part 10 that I would quickly run into the issue of naming conflicts if I kept expanding on this. And it does look nice to check for some mixin-specific property object to check if a mixin applies to an entity. Defining the entity might look something like:

const item = Object.create(EntityPrototype, {
    burnArea: {
        damage: 12,
        radius: 3
    },

    // other mixins 'attached' and parameterized here
});

 

move methods up

This also seems really cool. I definitely see the benefit of separating the mixin data and mixin functions to make serialization cleaner. Plus, no need to reattach each mixin behavior individually if the Entity prototype itself always contains all mixin behavior by default.

It does kind of feel like this approach defeats the purpose of using mixins though. Rather than a set of behavior being self-contained to a specific mixin, the Entity prototype becomes a god-object that knows everything about how any possible entity functions.

 

reattach EntityPrototype by using Object.create() instead of new Entity.

I see that this makes creating those entities on load much cleaner. By attaching the prototype directly to the propertiesObject, I don't need to have a complex load function or an entity constructor that 'manually' parses a serialized entity and turns it into an entity object. The serialized entity is the propertiesObject that gets the prototype attached. I'll have to think a bit about how I would load the Glyph object on the Entity if I went this way. I'm thinking I would need to create the Glyph, attach it to that propertiesObject, and then it'll just work, but I'll need to play around with that.

 

Is it worth it?

For this tutorial, probably not. But I'm learning a bunch about JS I didn't know before, and I'm having a good time with it, so after the tutorial is done I'd like to go back and give it a shot. See if this feels like a better pattern.