Knockback enemy based off of direction sprite is facing

Question

Today I am trying to make it so if I hit the enemy then the enemy will be knocked backwards in the direction the sprite is facing. I am rotating the sprite around 360 degrees using a joystick on the screen and wanted to know the best practice or ways to accomplish this. I have come up with a few ideas but none of them make use of the sprites angle he is facing just a check to see if I hit the bottom then move him upward and so forth. I am just stumped on how to apply the sprites angle to the enemies x and y coordinate and move him accordingly. Has anyone tried this and have suggestions or things to look for?

Answer 1

You'll need to turn the angle of rotation into a 2d vector which represents the direction the sprite is facing. You can then add or subtract this 2d vector onto the sprites position to move it forward or backwards in the direction it's facing.

You can generate the vector with something as simple as using cos() and sin() for the X and Y components of this vector. (you'll need to ensure you don't mix degrees and radians when passing into these functions - plus ensure that when the angle is Zero that your sprite is facing directly right, although you could fix this by adding a constant onto the angle passed into cos/sin to adjust for any rotation that exists in the sprite).