I’m trying to figure out the “proper” (I know this is all relative) approach to managing states of elements in a scene. I may be overthinking things, but I’ve gotten myself into a thought hole and can’t dig my way out…

The goal is to have reusable components for common and generic items like doors and switches. Building these as discrete components isn’t a problem. Adding them to a scene and getting the switch to tell the door to open isn’t a problem.

But adding more doors, and having to make sure the door/switch pairs are connected and synchronized (if door defaults open, the switch also needs to default on). Yes, I can set them in the inspector, but it’s easily overlooked, and becomes a lot more complicated with a lot of these sort of things in a scene.

Creating a large state machine to manage an entire scene at this level feels wrong and needlessly complex. Would removing the state control from the individual components, and combining them into a parent node with a script managing the door-switch state make more sense?

For additional context, I’ve been using the Godot State Charts addon, which very specifically keeps states contained within their node. This could be affecting my thought process, too, and maybe I need to dump that and write my own.

My rubber duck isn’t helping, so I look to you, Internet Strangers, to help realign my processes.