I had a concept for a game come to me this morning but I can't figure out how I'd go about implementing the movement.
The general idea involves the left and right controls causing a sprite to go round the center of the plane/(or the centre of the game area) in an orbit rather than moving left and right and the up and down will cause the orbit distance to either increase or decrease unless there is something in the way.
The best way I can think of doing this would be to maintain the polar coordinates of my sprite and convert that to Cartesian coordinates for drawing. Would that work? Is there an easier way?
Also how would I go about ensuring that the sprite was rotated such that it was at a right angle to the line from the center point?
Would I be better off implementing this using gravity and a using a repelling force to keep the character at the desired distance? If so How would I go about doing this?