So the first assessment piece in my course was to create a simple game of Pong. For the uneducated, or those who don’t like games without hyper realistic detail on the shading of a characters lip and a draw distance the size of continental Africa, Pong is the very first videogame that ever existed.
It’s that game where a white dot (the ball) is bounced back and forth between two longer white blocks (the paddles) until one player wins. For the full history of the game, the search engine is in the upper right of your browser, and if you want a video of the history, search for “I, Videogame”.
Anyway, we had four weeks to create our own version of Pong from scratch, including the pseudocode (probably my biggest weakness in programming at the moment). That might sound like a massively long time, but since the weeks are only 2.5 days long, it only amounted to 80 hours.
It was an annoying road to complete the project, what with how I had to change the method of drawing the game to the screen to stop it from incessantly flickering and lost a week doing so, but I did manage to meet the base requirements and go a little further.
It completely works as a game that you can play against another person (or yourself) in the same room, but I didn’t get the chance to add quite a bit of things. There’s no sounds, which I really wanted to put in; there were some effects I wanted to put in with the colours that could’ve looked nice; AI for the second player was one of the first things I wanted to put in once I had the game almost done, since when I was testing I had to constantly control both players, which got boring; and there’s no customisable settings whatsoever. Every game is the same length, visuals are constant, etc.
Plus there’s no help screen within the game yet, so I had to include a readme text file.
So that’s a lot of stuff I’m gonna work on changing when I have the time, but for now, it’s just a barebones game of Pong. I’m still proud of the effort and work I put in, though, and it certainly works, so I’d love it if you could download it and let me know what you think.
Download Tennis (Windows)
If it doesn’t work, shoot me a message in some way. If you want a quick reply, use the contact form on the main website.
I’ll look to update it as soon as I can, but I’m not fully committed to just my programming; I do a lotta lotta lotta things.
Speaking of which…
Update on my latest story: While I had said that I would be posting it in one month, it’s looking like I won’t make it by then. That’s what I get for imposing a deadline on myself. I’ll update on various websites how it’s going, but don’t hold your breath. It’s far from finished and I don’t work to anyone else’s schedule.
There’s also a lot of other random things I wanna mention, but they would probably be better suited to Twitter updates than putting in here.
Lastly, I will be out of town for the first week (starting this Friday) of April for a Team Leadership course, so if you want to ask/talk to me about anything specific, you’d better hurry. Or you can not and think more about what you want to ask for when I get back; your choice.
Hope all you Americans that I tend to talk to online are having fun with the lead up to Summer. Anyone been broken by all the tests and homework yet? I usually can live with lots of work; it’s the weight of the bloody textbooks on my back for 6 hours a day that does me in.
Regards,
≈Roy