Colliding penguins has turned out to be more complicated than I initially thought.
There are two different types of collisions: one where penguins are moving into the same space and one where two penguins are facing and each is trying to get to the space that the other occupies.
What should happen to the penguins after they collide? Should they reverse directions? What if it is not a head-on collision (i.e. they are both moving into the same cell, one moving vertically and one moving horizontally)? Reversing directions doesn’t make sense for a realistic collision, but anything else could be confusing from a gameplay point of view.
What should happen if multiple penguins collide from different directions?
What should happen when penguins of different sizes collide? Should a big penguin push a small penguin, instead of reversing direction?
There is also the possibility of collisions that result in a traffic jam - one penguin in the collision should reverse direction, but can’t because that would mean a head-on collision with another penguin in that direction.
For now, I want to simplify things so that the result of a collision can easily be predicted by the player. A few ideas:
- all collisions are ‘fatal’ and the penguins stop. This would mean that collisions could not be part of a puzzle’s solution, so I’d prefer to avoid this for now.
- collisions involving more than two penguins are fatal (easy to remember)
- size of penguins in the collision does not matter (easy to remember, but it might look a bit unbelievable).
