That's generally been my experience as well. However I've seen some frameworks where you can do collision imperatively. For example if (sprite.collide(tilemap

That's generally been my experience as well. However I've seen some frameworks where you can do collision imperatively. For example if (sprite.collide(tilemap)) {do something} These are generally on smaller less taxing frameworks (in this case I'm referring to haxeflixel) but they do exist!