I am working on a 2D sprite game for educational purposes. (In case you want to know, it uses WebGl and Javascript) I've implemented movement using the Euler method (and delta time) to keep things simple. Now I'm trying to tackle collisions.

The way I wrote things, my game only has rectangular sprites (axis aligned, never rotated) of various/variable sizes.

So I need to figure out what I hit and which side of the target sprite I hit (and I'm probably going to use these intersection tests). The old fashioned method seems to be to use tile based grids, to target only a few tiles at a time, but that sounds silly and impractical for my game. (Splitting the whole level into blocks, having each sprite's bounding box fit multiple blocks I might abide. But if the sprites change size and move around, you have to keep changing which tiles they belong to, every frame, it doesn't sound right.) In Flash you can test collision under one point, but it's not efficient to iterate through all the elements on stage each frame. (hence why people use the tile method).

Bottom line is, I'm trying to figure out how to test only the elements within the player's range of motion. (I know how to get the range of motion, I have a good idea of how to write a collisionCheck(playerSprite, targetSprite) function. But how do I know which sprites are currently in the player's vicinity to fetch only them?)

Please discuss. Cheers!