pikuorguk

Made some progress with the game. It has a proper name now, and a suitably cheap looking title screen. It is a Pong clone after all, there’s only so much you can do to make it look interesting.

I did have a working game earlier in the week, but the collision detection was awful. It just played badly, and if there’s one thing worse than yet another Pong clone, it’s a badly written Pong clone. After all, if you can’t cope with making Pong, how are you going to cope with making something better?

So I’m ripping the guts out the game and rewriting the collision code. I’m using Pong as a test for the game engine I’m really writing. I got really confused yesterday trying to work out if my code was wrong, or if the collision detection routine was wrong. Five minutes with Processing resulted in a working one-player Pong clone with working collision detection. Pong’s really really simple to write if you’re not trying to learn a new piece of hardware at the same time

Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.

Work continues on my Pong clone. Over the past few days I’ve managed to fix the collision detection on the bats and have been looking at simple AI for the computer’s bat.

Not really knowing what to do, I had a bit of a Google and came across all sorts of complex looking ways to make the bat chase the ball, but after trying a few I came to the realisation I was doing it all wrong…

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Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.

Made some more progress on my DS coding. Po_Ng now has two bats and a ball. The ball bounces around the screen using this absurdly simple bit of code:

if (xpos < 0 || xpos >= 256) xv *= -1;
if (ypos < 0 || ypos >= 192) yv *= -1;

xpos += xv;
ypos += yv;

Yeah, making stuff bounce around the screen is that simple So simple I had to use Google to find out how…

Tomorrow I make it bounce off the bats too.

Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.

Can you guess what it is yet?

After spending a few hours tonight sorting out the multitude of notes and scribbles I have, my little DS project has something to show off.

Right now the bats don’t move, and neither does the ball. However the hooks are there for me to make that happen, in a planned and non hacked way.

The nature of the DS’s screens are still totally baffling. How do I know which screen mode is the best to use? On the GBA it was simple, they all had different but obvious functions. On the DS it seems you can use any, and all that changes is the amount of video ram and where in memory things go.

The learning curve for this seems to be vertical at the moment, so I’m keeping notes to avoid the nasty trap of doing something once, and then never being able to repeat it.

Oh, to prevent insanity I am using a TiddlyWiki to store all my notes in. I was going to get a proper outlining app, but I don’t want one that ties me to Windows or my Mac. It’s no good if all my designs are on my Mac, but I’m working on my PC.

Oh yeah, this project is called Po_ng and is quite obviously a total ripoff of Pong. I’ll be adding some extra “game modes” to it and maybe some colour. The point of this game is not to produce yet another Pong ripoff, but to make sure I can get a basic game working. I have a list of classic games I want to remake, each one slightly more technically advanced than the last.

Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.