Entity Component System as an architectural approach in game development

Abstract

The game development industry is rapidly changing, it evolves, comes up with new tools and solutions, adapts to the trends to produce products faster, make them more and more interesting, and the development process cheaper. One of such key factors in game development is coding. The way code is designed, maintained, and structured, even what development ideas or technologies are used, significantly impacts the cost, time of development process, and quality of the game. And as one of the main and biggest key parts of the development process, coding receives a lot of updates, new solutions, approaches, and tools as well. One of such updates that the industry receives very often is relative to the design approaches. One of the biggest changes to the industry brought huge attention to the data-oriented design and, mainly, its architectural 1pattern 2Entity Component System (ECS). Our work is devoted to one of these new approaches. Here, we will try to bring the light on what features can bring ECS to the game development industry, what tasks it can solve when it could be used, and what problems it may cause. What other technologies and approaches can be used alongside it and what is the best practices utilizing such technology. In the demonstration on the example of a 3single-player first-person shooter (FPS), we will illustrate how this technology behaves in development.