DarkStride - Content

Yes, that pong

General Description:

On Yahoo, there are 11 million hits for the word Pong. I'm sure your asking yourself why I choose to make that 11 million and one... and a fairly shoddy one at that. The answer is quite simple... time. Or rather the absence of. It is my beleif that almost all individual programmer games are doomed to failure once they reach a certain size.

Most people can only sustain 8-10 months of a single concept before they move onto other projects. My goal in writeing Pong wasn't to write Pong at all, but rather to continue to polish and make usable the DSGameEngine classes. Pong isn't even the first step along this path, a previous project called Vaterot was first. It however hit the 6 month range and I lost interest. There are some big projects I want to write and to do that I need a solid set of base classes, field tested and ready. You can find the source code in the downloads section. So, onward to pong.

Features:

Fully functional single player mode
Up to two players! (Yes thats right, your not limited to playing against yourself)
Kewl wake and commet trail particle effects
Ability to network using all the DirectX protocals
Mouse controled paddles
Um... yea thats about it

Game Play:

Wow is it boring. I to this day struggle to see how our predicessors thought pong an interesting game. Maybe if you mounted some plasma cannons on the end of your paddle or something... but even then i'd have doubts. Games can literally go on forever, or at least they could until I added a fairly noticable ball speed increase everytime it hits a paddle.

So usually a game is 20-30 seconds tops. The network shuts down after the game is finished, something that would of course need to change if this were a real project. My only real regret is not spending more time on the particle effects, and not adding sound. Can we say Pong2? Hell no.

Screen Shots:

Warstrider (09/15/2005)

Published on: 2005-09-01 (11689 reads)

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