This doesn't seem like a good practice to encourage; it's really a job for ipairs or numeric for (at least, those would be the idiomatic ways to do it).

Ok. I've pushed the change to the github.

I just noticed something else. In construct_level, pairs should be ipairs. Iteration order of pairs is undefined, so it won't necessarily put your blocks in the right order. I don't think it's true. function bricks.construct_level( level_bricks_arrangement ) bricks.no_more_bricks = false for row_in...

For example, the cyclomatic complexity of the "check_rectangles_overlap" function can be reduced to 1, with half the LOC. ... This should be easier to reason about, especially for beginners. Indeed, this method looks much simpler (especially with this nice trick of two separate overlap ch...

Most ball and paddle games seem to treat collisions as if the paddle were shaped like the top part of a circle,

I've changed the platform-ball collision code to imitate a rebound from a spherical surface. I think, that has helped. Thanks, airstruck.

That's how Breakout plays more or less, of course neither option is considered "realistic" in terms of the physics simulation. ... There really isn't a "canonical algorithm"... I don't think there is any need in accurate realistic physics in the current version of the game. Stil...

It's been awhile since my last post here. Some progress has been made on the project, though the pace has slowed down significantly. I've updated the code of the third chapter to use the no-OOP style of the chapters 1 and 2 and replaced HC and hump.gamestates with the ad-hoc solutions described earl...

Another approach is to move these objects into another global, something like: ... Yes, global variables sometimes can significantly simplify the code. However, i think, in this case the number of game states and game objects is small enough, so globals are not really necessary. Still, I agree that...

I've updated "Advanced Gamestates" part to use dynamic gamestates loading.
Apart from that, not much progress during the week.

In your case, I would go one step further and just load the states dynamically: Yeah, it seems, it would be a better way. Apart from hiding the gamestates from the global scope, it would also allow to avoid an obscure discussion of module loading order and module predeclaration. I'll probably try t...

There is much more to making a game than programming. IMO, programming is only a quarter of the necessary work. Given that, I would suggest you to find a game engine that doesn't require much programming and concentrate on the things you can do ("I can create art/sprites, I can make music, I ca...