To be honest, I gave it a second thought about writting this post because I didn’t have a factory interface, but since the theory of the pattern itself is so useful I simply skip to implementing either a simple function or a full class to get it done.

Factory as a simple method was used in Balloon Bliss and Atomik Kaos for instance, since all we needed was to say what the type of token and the game logic handled the rest.

Factory as a class was used in Tech Wars since we had to deal with waves of very different enemies.

We did something like:
» Every factory class implements IFactory (with a create method)
» We use reflection (ability to fetch data about components) to auto build factories

I don’t know AS3, but as it is a high level programming language, it should support these kind of operations. Our algo is:

We have a container with an hastable that maps keys to factories. On init, we go trough all classes on the package and check if they inherit from our base factory. If they do, we register each one on the container. And that’s it. Now we’re able to do:

FactoryContainer container = FactoryContainer.BuildFrom( BaseWeaponType );
IWeaponType type = container.Create(data);
…

And don’t have to create a factory time and maintain it every time.