Consider a beat-em-up like Double Dragon, Streets of Rage, or River City Ransom.
Imagine an enemy type, say "Whip Girl", who also spawns with a whip (that other enemies use too). Of course, I'd be tempted to make a whip object, and add it to a container for whip girl, because that enemy always spawns with the whip.
But let's say that if you defeat a whip girl, she drops the whip, and the player can start using that whip.
The problem is that it appears that an object can only be part of one parent container.
Is there a better way than to either make a whip sprite, a whipgirlwhip sprite, a playerwhip sprite, and assign them to their respective parent objects,
or to have one whip sprite and try and keep track of all the instances on screen with their proper z indexes?
I'm assuming I can't just have one whip sprite that can belong to both whipgirl and player?