What’s that Pong!?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on some iPhone game development. For a long time I’ve wanted to get back into game dev (long abandoned after University as something that I didn’t have time for) — the iPhone is proving to be a fun platform to work with.
So here is a brief treatment of my first project, which for the moment goes by the moniker DotSlashPong. It’s in (working, but early) prototype at the moment, but I’ll tell you more about it as development continues — and provide a few screenshots in about a months’ time!
Overview
Pong is an ancient videogame classic. The original game featured a few simple elements — two paddles, a ball bouncing between them. The object of the game was to bounce the ball off your paddle in such a way that your opponent failed to subsequently hit it. If the ball goes off your side of the screen, your opponent scores a point.
Simple. Laughably primitive by today’s standards.
DotSlashPong takes that gameplay and tears its face off. The basic gameplay is the same, albeit sped up somewhat to cater for the faster twitchin’ reflexes of today’s gamer on the go. The paddle is controlled by subtle twisting of the iPhone, using the accelerometers to convert that twisting motion into movement of the paddle. We add a liberal sprinkling of power-ups, some extremely shiny neon graphics, a theme, a subtle whiff of a metagame, and occasional complete breakdown of the expected Pong metaphor.
Then we toss that on the iPhone, liberally apply multiplayer and network connectivity in some unexpected ways, and see what we get.
