It’s been a while since I’ve written anything. Since my last progress update, I haven’t been feeling very motivated. I’ve more or less been playing video games all day with some drawing here and there. My internet connection has been garbage lately and until this morning, I’d hit a wall with my programming project.
I first posted my collision detection problem on Stack Overflow a few days ago and I ended up only getting two comments. The first one pointed me to this page. Something I wish I’d seen before I posted. And the second one was helpful, but didn’t fix the problem I was having. I thanked them and tried to explain a little further, but figured I should re-post the question in a more concise manner.
Soon after posting, I realized I didn’t present my problem in the best way. For starters, I gave too much irrelevant background information. And I posted way too much code. Looking back, I probably could’ve gotten by with about a fifth of the information I provided.
After randomly checking my post again this morning, there was another comment and that ended up steering me in the right direction. I guess all I needed was some insight. And a break.
The problem ended up being multiple things. First, I wasn’t setting the bounds of the laser objects. At all. Meaning there was no hit-box to detect the collisions. The second thing I had to do was make an ArrayList of laser objects. Then figure out how to add lasers shot by the player to it. I was pretty surprised how quickly I worked it all out. The last thing I need to do is add the start & game over screens.
For now, I’m going to leave it at that and look into some other books and projects. I’ve been learning a lot from this book but it’s also a headache at times because it’s IDE specific and outdated.
There are a few other things I want to start working on. A text-based adventure game. A desktop application. And I feel like now is a good resting point for this series of LibGDX projects. I can feel the motivation starting to come back and I’m excited to explore some new projects.
