Sometimes, when you think you know how well (or poorly) a particular task will go, you’re right. However, if you’re doing game development stuff, you’re probably wrong, unless you think things will go poorly, in which case game development will make you think that you were wrong about it going poorly, but only long enough to show you that you were right the first time, and you were in fact wrong. Clear as mud? Welcome to game development!

Of course, I kid. I’m sure this has nothing whatsoever to do with game development and it’s probably just software development itself. Over the years I’ve learned that the universe can be quick to anger and takes offense at even the most innocuous of slights.

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It occurred to me that I had gone more than a week or two without diving back into engine code to crank around at its inner workings, so it was probably time to fix that. Well, more accurately, I decided that I wanted to be able to test things out on my tablet devices and the code that I had wasn’t quite there yet, so I thought I’d tweak it up a little bit.

So I set out on an epic quest to try and make a canvas appear at a position and size of my choosing on an HTML page, hoping that some how, some way, the mystic art of laying out something in a web page had somehow gotten more intuitive. Alas.

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In this week’s update, ts-breakout gets a little pixel love thanks to Kenney Vleugels and his Puzzle Pack 2 (which is also where the paddle and ball graphics for ts-tennis came from, although it appears I did not credit that at the time. Sorry Kenney!).

This brings exercise #6 to a close and, according to Plain Tasks, gets us 35% of the way through all of the exercises for this particular game. Hooray!

Now, why was this so much harder than I thought it would be?

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In this week’s update, yet another take on collision handling is covered in order to finish exercise #5. Haughtily, I presumed that the issue (as the course states it) did not in fact affect me due to the re-factor of the original code to work with ts-game-engine. At worst I thought that things would need to change a bit to stop the ball from being allowed off the screen while it was attached to the paddle.

How wrong I was.

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