So, broad phase and narrow phase are strange creations that don’t make sense to me. I understand the existence of narrow phase as it covers when two or more object are obviously colliding which is what’s important, but broad phase seems like it shouldn’t get much use in the real world. The only example I could think of while doing my fundamentals tasks was particle simulations with a large number of objects that require slightly less precise interactions over time to save on compute power.

The two forms of collision detection was a good thing to cover though as it allowed me to have a better understanding of wat would be more suitable in different situations like platforming or object interaction. Overlap was very useful to research as many games use it in different ways and with different optimisations. Obviously, it has its flaws such as when the collision is only for the boundary of an object without a ‘push-back’ method which causes the most common glitch in modern games where the player gets stuck inside an object. Boundary was also interesting to research as it lead me to the game ‘Asteroids’ which I ended up playing for a while. The simplistic nature of it was something I should really consider while planning and creating games in the future since I tend to want to make very complex and interesting games without considering the beauty in simplicity. A good example is ‘Cookie Clicker’ which is so simple in the premise of click and wait, yet is so well known and enjoyed.

Restitution is something I found rather interesting to read about as it applies to a lot of physics based games and has a lot of potential for mechanics. It lead me to an interesting physics simulation showing a relationship between the number of collisions between two objects with one being 100 times the mass of the other:

This use of restitution would be way to complex and inefficient to use in a game, but it’s interesting to see how outside of games these techniques can be used. With use of Phaser becoming part of our studies, it will be interesting to explore the physics calculations possible with an API optimised for creating 2D games and how accessible it will be.

I created a small concept art for my game as I go over the supplied example code for Phaser. I would like to create something similar to ‘Plants Vs Zombies’ in terms of waves of enemies with static weapons at the other end of the screen but defending a rocket instead of a house. Although, while looking over the Phaser 3 documentation, it doesn’t seem to be widely used enough to have useful answers to code problems online.