War Pong Blog

For those of you without extreme perceptive powers, I feel obligated to tell you that I haven’t updated this much lately. Current development state of anything War Pong related is “in-mind”, that is to say “it only exists in my mind”.

If you’d like to see what I get up to these days, you can follow my regular blog (the one which ISN’T War Pong related) at http://slasheethecow.blogspot.com .

This isn’t anything new. In fact this stuff is pretty old. But I just thought you might like to see some of the stuff that gets cut. The following are skins that I originally planned to make for War Pong but for whatever reason they didn’t make the cut.

Christmas (yes… all that)

Yes, I originally planned to release a Christmas edition of War Pong at one time, but never got around to it. I only ever finished a the bats and a ball.

Digital
I hope you like green, because that’s all digital was. I started it just before I started WPHD and never got around to finishing it.

3D

Fret not, I would never put a 3D graphics engine into a game and never release it. These 3D graphics were pre-rendered and then made all squishy-spritey. I only finished one of the bats and the logo.

Rainbow

This skin was actually completed, and not by me. Unfortunately it came to me too late to be included in any of the versions. I might release it for kicks someday though.

SixSided

Of all the skins I didn’t finish, SixSided is the one that came closest to completion. And while not everything in the skin is made of hexagons (yes, I’m a liar, apparently) much of it is.

And that’s the wonderful gallery of the failed skins of War Pong. I hope you enojyed it.

Yes, I updated the website, using whatever tools in Dreamweaver looked cool. You’ll need javascript enabled, and I probably broke some of the early blog posts clearing all the crap out of the root folder of the server (not that most people will see the difference).

New War Pong (don’t worry that name isn’t going to stick).

• Played around a bit, and with the help of the allegro.cc forum members (you guys rock!) got some cool looking things going (I just have to be careful not to add too much eye candy to the final game).
• And that’s about it.

Anyway the update to Team Fortress 2 just finished downloading so I’m going to play that… peace y’all.

And you’d notice right. I haven’t done the War Pong birthday stuff I said I might.

I hope you’ve noticed by now I’m not very reliable.

So you won’t take this post saying I’m working on War Pong X very seriously, will you?

Especially since I’m working on a few things which will probably take ages, not work, and I’ll ditch.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

So what have I done today? Obviously I wrote you that fine post earlier, so that’s one thing. I only started working on it today, so… don’t expect the world. Half the stuff in lists like this is trivial stuff made to sound impressive.

Project Y

• Gave it a codename (already thought of a good final name, however I’m not completely sold on the idea, and I don’t like revealing names until I have logos… exception being the original War Pong because it didn’t have a logo for a while).
• Thought up, wrote down basic gameplay concepts (spoiler… I’m ripping off two games this time, not just one like I usually do, although I think they make an… interesting… join).
• Made the basic framework (I can open a completely black window… yay.)
• Made font for in-game menus, scores, etc. (hence me saying I was working on graphics during development earlier).
• Made slightly more progress on making it qualify as a game (added some text, and I can now move an object around).
• Now the actual work… started work on collision detection (which I am now going to into more detail about for those who are interested).

War Pong features pixel perfect collision detection. War Pong HD features bounding box collision, the libraries lacking a native pixel detection method (and doing it pixel-by-pixel is slower and in some cases WPHD goes slow enough). Since Project Y is going to feature more objects (i.e. more than 13) to test collision on, I implemented a system to make checking for collisions pretty easy. It remains to be seen how fast it runs when I ramp up the number of objects (hopefully it doesn’t slow it down too much, it’ll probably be a graphics bottleneck like WPHD is… sorry). Oh, and I forget to mention… it’s bounding box collision, but it should be more than accurate enough. I’ll have to see how well it does when I have more than just a collision detection tech demo with 2 objects running…

Firstly, I’d like to thank my readers. You’re both great.

And that’s all I’m going to say. Well, not really. I’ll tell you that it is not a new War Pong version (more on that coming), and while it does “borrow ideas” from some games, I haven’t seen anything particularly like it (not that I’ve looked, though). Not ready to say much more about the game itself, however I will bore you with something about the development…

You see kids, when an IDE and an API love each other very much… no, what I would like to share is how I’m doing this different to War Pong (and Galaxy Invaders, which I will both gladly call my own and say how much it sucks…). With both of them, during development I just used placeholders (usually just rectangles or circles) for the graphics, then skinned when I was done (in fact, the first version of War Pong, now lost to time and my hard drive, was completely self-contained and used single coloured shapes and a system font, drawn completely in-game). With this game, I’m making the graphics for each part as I put it into the game, hoping that the game might start to style itself around the graphics. So far what I’ve done is reminding me of the original War Pong skin (Retro War), not as in “oh I can’t tell these apart” but as in “that looks pretty similar…”. Anyway it’s still early stages.

So I guess if I’m making a new project it needs a name,  if you’ll remember back to the “teasing pontlessly when I should have been telling you stuff” of War Pong HD’s development, probably here, you’ll see I had a big X thing going on. To that end, the temporary name that I completely reserve the right to change at any time will be Project Y, although chances are I’ll just call it that game I’m making.

About that War Pong X thing… to tell the truth, for a while during development, the name was “War Pong X”, it ran at the same resolution as War Pong, and had a completely separate skin to what was finally released (complete even to features that weren’t added yet, like super shots). Maybe for War Pong HD’s birthday (don’t worry folks, its only a bit over 4 months away), I’ll either upscale the skin or downscale the game engine as a treat.

Otherwise with War Pong, War Pong HD showed me a lot of things to do right and a lot of things to do wrong, so other than an update or two (I’ve nearly finished one), the next major release of War Pong (if there is one) will be completely rewritten… it can just be too hard to tack all the changes on to what’s already there.

And that’s all for now, unless I feel like adding something later… I’m pretty unpredictable.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I am. Whether I’m doing anything is another matter. I am, as long you count just thinking up ideas that I’ll soon forget as work.

I’m thinking of doing a remake of Galaxy Invader… what would you think of that? (Hmm… I’ve disabled comments - if you want me to, take down Microsoft’s website and I’ll get the message).

I’ve also thought of recreating War Pong HD using another graphics library (Allegro is great, but… everybody knows OpenGL). If you like that idea, take down Apple’s website.

Just a quick note to say that I’ve added an FAQ page - there’s a link on the right there.

This is the first in what will hopefully be a series of how to cheat get ahead learn more about War Pong. This first lesson covers the way the ball bounces off the bat.
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