Long Delays, But Finally an Update

It's been a while since I last posted here, so I figured I should probably post an update. We've been busy with other, unfortunately more important, life-related things, and hadn't really been able to do any work on anything until today.

The last few times Matti had a chance to do any coding, he'd been struggling with collision detection. Things just plain out did not seem to work. He was trying to figure out how to properly get which side of the brick was hit. After trying several things, and becoming increasingly frustrated with it, I suggested that he should have a collision rectangle on each side of every brick. That way, by detecting collisions on those, he could properly reflect the ball off the surface.

And now, he's done just that. It works wonderfully. The next step will be to get the paddles working better. Right now, they just reflect the ball at a 90 degree angle. This is absolutely useless to a player, as he'd have no control over the way the ball goes. It would bounce the same way every single time he played, and that's simply no fun. The solution is to bounce the ball based off of where it hits the paddle. If it hits on the far right side, it should bounce sharply to the right. If it hits on the far left side, it should bounce sharply to the left. If it hits directly in the center, it should bounce directly up (although this is highly improbable). The player can then take advantage of this functionality to bounce the ball in the direction he wants it to go.

Skyler sent in his images, and they're awesome. I'll post a screenshot, or maybe a video, of the game with his images included later on; probably sometime tomorrow. As for now, I'm going to start work on the paddle and, if I have time, begin on the multiplier.

I wish I could stay true to the 1-game-a-week goal of this project, but I feel that this game could be a lot more than it is right now, and I know that Matti and I are skilled enough to release it in a completed form. As such, I'm going to push back the deadline even further. I'm setting it for this Saturday. This should give us -plenty- of time to put in all the features we want.

Matti will post later regarding a lot of the technical details to what he's done. I'm sad to say it, but I've mostly sat on the sidelines for this project so far. I'm entirely useless when it comes to collision detection and heavy mathematics. That's something I really need to brush up on.