Friday, October 30, 2009

PONG Clone Completed!!!

It is with great pleasure that I announce I have finally completed a game of my own! There are some obvious improvements that could be made (adding sound, better art, etc.) but it is a fully working game with Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the computer opponent, basic menus, scoring, and clear winning conditions. I'm particularly proud of the ball's motion blur, a subtle effect that makes the game look more polished.

The left paddle is controlled with the W (up) and S (down) keys. Likewise, the right paddle is controlled with the O and L keys.

Download the Game Now!

I would be very appreciative of any feedback; just leave me a comment here on the blog to let me know what you think. I will provide a breakdown of the effort spent on this simple game (done in 24 hours!) in an upcoming post.

5 comments:

  1. Okay. This techno-illiterate friend downloaded the game but it will not run. I want to see how it looks and I want to play PONG until the wee hours of the night :)

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  2. Hmmm... I did forget to mention you need to have DirectX 9.0c runtime installed. Try clicking the Download button here first: http://bit.ly/3EakMF

    If it still doesn't work let me know what error message you get so I can figure it out. Thanks!

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  3. Oops, here's a better link for the DX runtime: http://bit.ly/3EakMF

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  4. "The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect"

    Thats what I'm getting when I attempt to run Pong.exe

    Do I need to get the DX runtime to resolve this?

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  5. Thanks Wes! My friend Jeff had a similar problem but your error text led me to (what I hope is) the solution. You DO need the DirectX runtime linked above. But the key I missed was that you ALSO need the C++ runtime: 32-bit (XP and below) or 64-bit (Vista/7).

    This is akin to installing the .NET framework (though that's a standard Windows Update item) to run programs developed on that platform. I realize it's a bummer to ask folks to do multiple installations for such a simple game and will have to add an installer in the future.

    Good thing we'll be working on a flash game! :)

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