Tasty planet but skillful (even though skill comes mainly from annoying collisions, the point stands). Got all 6 stars, and my final verdict: this game sucks
Viewing post in This Place Sucks: A Vacuum Story jam comments
If you still don't understand collisions enough, here's a quick rundown: there are layers and masks. Masks detect layers of the same value.
1. Mask of 1 will collide with layer 1, but not anything else.
2. An object with a mask but with no layers will get easily stopped and pushed around by other objects with a layer the same value as mask
So for your game, you could have the vacuum be all 5 masks at the start (from small to big) and different objects to be different masks AND the same value layer, depending on size as well. Once the vacuum grows, change the smallest mask into a layer of the same value.
If im not completely insane, this should make that vacuum pushes objects smaller than it is, but also get stopped by objects bigger.
The first person to get all 6 stars, congrats! Thank you for playing it until the end. The collisions annoy me too...
My intended idea was having the smallest objects have no collision with the player, that way you could run right over them. When you get big it gets really difficult to see the small objects, and unrealistic that they'd stop you.
When I disabled collision layers and masks though, it'd make running into small objects fly all over the place. I really couldn't figure out how to make no-collision happen. This was tricky because the player's nozzle needs to still interact. On top of that I had certain objects like tables and counters that needed to let other objects sit on top, exit, then not return, all while colliding with the player.
On my last attempt to get it all working I nearly broke the whole damn game and decided to leave it and move on.