Oh wow, dat massive post
Thanks! That should help a lot I think, yeah. I'm actually studying game design at the university but this is the first course in two years (and it's voluntary, sort of) where I'm completely on my own with doing a whole game and not small prototypes. I'm using intersect and globalbounds in sfml to detect collision between bullets and enemies and that works fine (just need to insert the explosion for a few frames somehow but that's a minor detail). No reason why the same shouldn't work between enemy bullets and the player. I should be able to use something similar to that I suppose for moving the ship outside the screen?
My resolution is 800*600 and the ship's origin is at the sprite center of a 32*32 (I think) sprite so I suppose I gotta remove half of that to compensate. Wouldn't want half the ship sticking out 


