Classic Game Programming on the NES

11 Player collisions and lives

This chapter covers

• Handling the player’s ship colliding with enemies
• Animating the player’s death sequence
• Displaying the current player’s lives
• Handling the game-over message

In this chapter, we are going to cover handling the collision between the player and enemies, animating the player’s death sequence, and displaying the number of lives the player has remaining. Of course, once the player has run out of lives, we need to show Game Over on the screen, returning to our game intro screen so the player can view the high score and start a new game.

11.1 Player collisions

First, we need to detect if any of the enemy objects have hit the player’s ship. The best place to do this is in our existing enemy object loop, ...