PONG Turbo – My first stab at game programming

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Phil   no comments yet

I developed an installation tool at work for our product which automates the motions of checking the project out of SVN, importing a database and adding the site and virtual directories in either IIS or Apache. This process, mainly the database import, takes a couple of minutes and my colleague Adam suggested that I need to add some kind of game to play while waiting for the process to complete. He of course was joking but I took the challenge literally!

The game

I started out with the intention to create a simple single player version of PONG but once this was in place I realised that pinging the ball against the back wall soon became somewhat tedious. So in true, retro arcade game fashion I stole some ideas from other games (Pacman and Space Invaders) and made the whole concept my own by…. adding Turbo to the end of the name! I still have some work to do in adding a high score board but I put it up for public consumption anyway.

The code

I literally threw some JavaScript at this thing and it works well enough so I probably won’t ever revisit the code for a clean up. You can take a look at the code on Github if you wish.

The future of PONG Turbo

I had a lot of fun putting this together, so much so that I am going to beef this out as a multiplayer game in a battle mode using Node. Check back soon for an update!