Day 5: Collisions and SFX

This will just be a brief update today. I implemented two things into the game: asteroids colliding with other asteroids and with the player's ship.

The physics of the asteroids colliding with each other is just placeholder. When they collide, they just reverse direction and don't bounce off of each other in realistic ways. The tutorial chose this method for simplicity. It was just a couple of lines of code. It does look a little weird in the game, but I'm not going to let it bother me in this case. It's beyond the scope of this project to get things working exactly how I would like them to work if I were to try to market this game.

When an asteroid collides with the player, the player's ship is destroyed in an explosion. In a later video, I believe the player will be granted some health so a single collision won't necessarily kill the player immediately. I did create the explosion animation myself. Using a series of rings and a little bit of color gives the impression of an explosion. I could have used an explosion spritesheet that someone else created, but where is the fun in that? The sound effects for the weapons and the explosion have all been made using JSFXR, a free online tool for generating a variety of different SFX. It's a neat little tool if you need 8-bit style sounds for a game.

The GIF below shows the asteroids bouncing off of each other and the explosion when one collides with the ship.

I had planned to complete a one or two more tutorial videos so I can still be on track to wrap up this first of four bootcamp games this weekend. However, I spent some time today reworking some of the ideas I have for Of Mice and Tales, the sticker collecting legacy game I plan to begin working on after completing my bootcamp. More details about the new direction I plan to take the game and why can be found on the devlog for this entire journey on The Corkboard.