Usually when working on in-game physics and stuff the best place to start is with what would be ‘correct’ in the real world. I only have a physics ‘O’ level (and that was a very long time ago) but that’s generally enough to get me by in the world of 2D gaming.
Sometimes though, what would be ‘correct’ in the real world just looks ‘wrong’ in an in-game context – and here’s an example.
In the first image, if you can see make it out, you’ll see that when the jetboard hits an obstacle the ‘blast’ sprites and particles carry on past the jetboard when it stops – this is because they are ‘correctly’ initialised with the same velocity as the jetboard. In practice though, this looks pretty stupid. I guess I could run collision detection on the blast sprites and particles and have them also collide into the obstacle (this would be ‘correct’) but that would be pretty impractical, particularly for the particles – I also think it would still look kind of weird.
So what I’ve done instead is make the blast sprites and particles always move relative to the jetboard, therefore their velocity slows down and speeds up as the jetboard does. Even though far from physically ‘correct’ this looks much better in a 2D gaming context.
Dev Time: 0.25 days
Total Dev Time: approx 20.75 days
Physically ‘Correct’ – Looks Like A Bug
Physically ‘Incorrect’ – Looks Much Better
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