Initial Launch

My final project for HTML Programming class.  It was an interesting project that brought together a lot of the concepts we worked on this semester.

Some of the key things I built special for this game:

• pixel collision detection: For the stalactites on top, I actually use pixel collision detection to see if the player ship collides with the background.  I optimize it by only reading the background pixels for where the player ship is located.
• Airplane shadow.  I wanted the player ship to be able to go down over the bottom a little bit to give a feeling of perspective. But there needed to be a point where they actually collide with the ground.  My idea to provide player feedback as to when they're about to collide was to provide a shadow for the player ship.  As the player gets closer to the ground, the shadow becomes closer and closer to the actual ship.
• explosions: at first I thought about having a set of sprite images that would animate to show the explosion. But I ended up building a very simple particle explosion which allows for each explosion to be a little different.