I had an idea for a pretty complex game the other night, and I was doing some preliminary sketches for it last night. It’s sort of an Arkanoid/Breakout variant, but there are some other things I want to experiment with. I’ve done a lot of really simple collisions systems in the past–and even a few non-trivial ones. Most of my previous systems used circle-circle or rect-rect collision, though, and so I thought it’d be fun to spend a few days looking into circle-rect collision algorithms.

I spent awhile just pondering it on paper (I’m sure there’s stuff out there, but hey–it’s fun to test the noodle a little bit every now and then) before eventually digging around for a pre-made system (did I just say…?). I stumbled across something I hadn’t heard of– APE: the Actionscript Physics Engine. I was pretty impressed with it (especially since it’s straight AS3). It’ll need some work to adapt it to game development (event generation for collisions, mainly), but there’s a LOT of promise there. In about 5 minutes this morning, I set up a simple ball-bouncing-around-room-and-off-of-moving-paddle experiment. Given another 15 or so, I think I could knock out a pretty decent Jezzball clone.  I think this thing is going to save me loads of development time and let me get straight to the fun stuff–prototyping.

While reading up on APE, I also stumbled across another cool site:Reiner’s Tilesets. They’re pretty much all isometric (while I tend to like developing side-scrollers), but the sheer volume of sprites available is pretty impressive. The quality isn’t fantastic, but the consistency from sprite to sprite makes it a really valuable resource. I’ll need to write a sprite-loader for AS3 (or re-purpose one), but the benefits are worth it…

So, two shiny new toys. It’s almost a shame I’m going to be camping and paddling all weekend. Almost.