This was a big one. I switched to Box2D for collision detection & physics.

My old system was nothing fancy: axis-aligned bounding boxes, a “sliding” mechanism for collisions, sector based space subdivision. Worked well for Superforce. However there’s a lot more happening in Devastro 2. More bullets, more particles, more enemies, more complicated level design, player motion needs to be fluid around obstacles etc. Box2D seems like the right tool for that job.

First I had to rip out large amounts of old code both in the game and the editor. Everything was completely broken for over a week. Fortunately the Box2D integration went well and the game is now back up and running.

The Box2D API is nice and there’s plenty of documentation & example code.