pong but better

Inspiration

My inspiration, was, of course, the actual Pong game. We got the template from the Gaming workshop. We thought the gameplay felt a little slow and restricted (only vertical movement allowed), so we decided to make it more fun.

What it does

It entertains you with a fun and innovative yet competitive one-on-one game that has a high skill ceiling and teaches competitors how to play with critical thought and planning ahead.

How we built it

We used the Godot game engine and the base Pong game from the Gaming workshop held at AcademiesHacks. We then added extra inputs for horizontal movement and teleportation along with modifying the constant speeds to quicken gameplay. We also formatted a basic score system that shows in the Output section.

Challenges we ran into

The left and right walls in the base pong game were coded as the same thing. This made the score system difficult to program, so instead of basing it on which wall it was done, it was based on which direction the ball was moving upon a score. Also, because vertical movement only was allowed in the original pong game, the paddles were able to move outside the walls once horizontal movement was added because coding was not present in the original game to restrict that.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This Pong game utilizes a teleportation feature that has never been seen before in a game of its kind and is very addicting (at least for the people who helped us test). We are also proud in general of learning how to use a game engine we never used before.

What we learned

We learned a little bit about how to work in Godot and add new inputs that correspond to different features in a pre-existing game template.

What's next for pong but better

We would like to tone down the rather unforgiving gameplay that occurs when inputs for teleportation are held too long (causes repeat teleportation). A cooldown may be implemented in a future version of pong but better. New gameplay elements, such as powerups may also be added alongside a visual scoreboard that appears on the game screen.

Built With

• godot
• python