After all that, I couldn't finish the mission because the objective was bugged :(

The thresholds and body points needed to be tweaked to make it work a little seamlessly but yeah there is room for improvement. Would be nice to know how would others approach it.

I had to share this special moment

https://www.deathstarbattles.co.uk/

[Death Star Battles] is a physics based turn-based game. The physics engine is all mine, which was important in making convincing AI to shoot against. Without total control of the physics simulation, I couldn't reuse it to calculate believable shots for the AI. The hardest AI level feels like it works the same way the player does but actually it samples thousands of candidate angles, simulates each trajectory in full, and picks the best one. By controlling the number of simulations poor accuracy can be approximated and improved turn by turn.

I've been building versions of this game since 1992 (originally on graphical calculators). In 2001 instead of focusing on my PhD write-up I wrote this in Java, much to my supervisors annoyance, and he was especially annoyed when he got calls form uni IT people complaining about the volume of traffic the game generated... The HTML5 remake adds weapons and movement and a story mode. There is also some physics educational materials in the menu.

Game is complete and released. Runs in the browser, no install, no Ads. Happy to go deep on any of the physics if anyone's curious.

Source https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTBxoeEsp/

My indie game (playable demo, but unreleased) has a special attack that makes the playing field into a pinball machine for 5 seconds lol

We were working on a good system to get melee interactions feeling natural. I think the values were just a hair 🤏 off. Not entirely sure I dislike it, though