Pong

Pong is technically the second game I’ve created in Godot. I created The Wheel project using entirely Control objects in Godot, so for Pong I wanted to learn how to use the 2D Nodes. Pong lets the player control the paddle on the left side of the screen, while an AI controls the paddle on the right. The goal is to prevent the ball from passing your paddle and entering your goal. The first to five points wins.

Assets

For this project, all assets were basic textures from the engine, including the default font for the basic UI.

Transform Physics

In previous attempts at making Pong, such as in Unreal Engine and in Unity, using the default Physics engine tends to make the collisions and movement work in ways I don’t actually want. For example, if the ball is moving fast enough, it could hit the paddle with enough force to push the paddle away. I didn’t want this behavior, so I handled the transform physics myself, detailing exactly how each object should react upon collision. This includes paddle-to-ball, paddle-to-wall, ball-to-wall, and ball-to-goal collisions.

Complications

I noticed that if the ball hits a paddle in a specific way, the ball will seem to shimmy inside the paddle, before shooting off in a random direction on the other end of the paddle. This is a bug in the way I am handling the collisions with the paddles. Currently, the paddles are configured to reverse the X velocity of the ball if the ball collides anywhere with the paddle. This causes complications if the ball hits the back or one of the back corners of the paddle, if the ball is coming in at an angle. If I were to fix this in future versions, it would be by changing the behavior of the collisions around the ends of the paddle’s boundaries.

Stretch Goal Implementation:

The stretch goal for myself for Pong was to include a basic form of adaptive difficulty. As the player’s score increases, the speed of the enemy paddle increases. This, along with the ball increasing slightly in speed anytime either character scores a goal, helped make the endgame feel more hectic, especially if the player was doing really well previously.