You might've seen previous posts on my conversion of Python to p5 from Wireframe magazine, and this has been by far the hardest one I've tried as it involved lots and lots of looping through arrays. Arrays not only of the elements which make up the characters, such as shots and shields but also through the matrix which I use to generate the images of the shots and shields. Using a matrix or multi-dimensional array in this way is an approach I'm thinking of adapting for the Digital Counter as it allows a visual representation of the character within an array and so makes tweaking the characters more accessible.
If you check through the history of the repo, you'll see that I went through many different methods of calculating whether or not a shot simply grazed a shield or whether it had a substantial impact, resulting in an explosion. I did this eventually by allowing the shot to have a hit point value which incremented each time it chewed a pixel from the shield; when that hit point reached a critical level, then the shot exploded and eroded a far greater chunk from the shield.
To save resources each shot is removed from an array when it drops too far beneath the stage, and each shield removed when it is empty. I guess I should also close the processing when there are no more shields, but this does pretty much what I wanted and seems to mimic the original Python implementation closely enough. If not you're welcome to branch and tweak it.
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