Charlie: Very nice tutorial but I can't help but wonder how you handled collision checking.
As i recall, i just used rect collisions. I think i just placed rects in key places on each monster, i.e. one for each of the crabs claws, and a larger one for the body.
Cheers
Charlie
Ah that makes sense, also do you optimize your collisions i.e quad trees or regions or is it just brute force checks?
Brute force. Rect collisions are extremely quick! The speed bottleneck for Irukandji was rendering. Max2D (the built in blitzmax library) isn't really all that quick as it creates a new surface for each textured quad (or at least it did, it may have changed now!). It's fast enough on most systems though, it even runs pretty well on my old laptop with Intel GMA graphics.
I probably would have been better off using the OpenGL based particle thing i've written for Scoregasm, but Irukandji was a very quick project (about 2 weeks), so i just kept things simple for myself.
Cheers
Charlie