(See What I Did There?  Falldown is shaping up.. :-D)

Falldown is really starting to take shape. Now, the game finally has reliable collision detection of a moving circle against moving rectangles.

That concept (detecting collisions between moving objects in a computer simulation) is much trickier than it sounds. Seriously, you have no idea how many resources I read before I finally succeeded.  Just about every word in that previous sentence is a link to an article, blog, or book that I used along the way to making the collision detection in Falldown work, and that’s just a sample.

In addition to the collision detection, I fixed errors in the game loop that were causing an unsightly display stutter/hiccup.  In short, the game animates smoothly, and the controls respond smoothly.

But don’t take my word for it; see for yourself!

I decided to do this the hard way and build this game using my own, hand-crafted game engine. Yikes!  “Why would you do that?” you ask, puzzled by my masochism. Well, I want to learn how to develop a game from scratch.

Now, I need to add other video game elements, like difficulty levels, high score tracking, menus, sound/music, etc.  But even though the game needs some work before it can be considered complete, it is nearly ready to be played by you!  I will release the game (and the source code on my Github page) once it has reached “playable demo” status.

I have to thank many people for teaching me what I’ve learned so far (manyof whom or may not know me.. yet…).  A few names stand out:

• Glenn Fiedler – gafferongames.com
• Dave Eberly – geometrictools.com
• Randy Gaul – randygaul.net
• Allen Chou – allenchou.net
• Christer Ericson – realtimecollisiondetection.net

Stay tuned for more updates!