TAKING PONG TO THE NEXT LEVEL
With Pong having been around for over 40 years, we’ve seen many iterations of what is essentially quite a basic game. Once our Pygame version of the game is fully functional, perhaps we could consider what steps we might take to improve our game?
On the easier end of the spectrum we could change the colour scheme from black and white to something more contemporary. When Pong was first released, black and white were the only options available. By the time the Atari came out there were 128 colours in the PAL format. Eight-bit consoles introduced 256 colours, and we’re now literally in the billions. Our game is designed in a VGA resolution, so if we were sticking to those retro/vintage aesthetics we’d only have 16 colours available to us. Try changing your Pong game to blue and yellow, for example.
What effect would changing the frame rate have on the game? Does increasing or decreasing it affect gameplay? Could we implement a momentary speedup when the ball hits off a wall surface, and a temporary slowdown when the ball bounces off a paddle? That might provide a dramatic special effect. Likewise, we could change the speed of the ball itself.
To make the game difficult, if we were to introduce ‘levels’ we might want to set the paddles to a smaller size. And to make things go completely whack-mode we could change the angles that balls bounce off walls, or even introduce more balls by spawning more objects from the ball class.