Simple Harmonic Motion and Its Applications in Games – Tuts+ Premium

Premium members: here’s this week’s tutorial. Simple harmonic motion is a type of movement commonly used to describe pendulums and springs. In this tutorial, you’ll learn the concepts behind this type of motion, and understand the many different ways you can apply this in your games: from an animated health warning, to the motion of attacking enemy ships.

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This tutorial focuses mainly on the mathematical formulae behind simple harmonic motion, and on implementing them in ActionScript, and uses a number of different examples to demonstrate how this could be used in games rather than ending up with one main example.

With that said, here’s one of the demos. Click to activate the pendulum, then try to move the green circle through using the arrow keys, without getting hit.

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Premium members can access the full tutorial right away!

If you’re not yet a Premium member, you can still read the first few steps of the tutorial, which are enough to introduce the main equation and use it to create an oscillating particle..

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