Arc Tangent

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.

Theme

Does Pong need a theme? Not par­tic­u­larly. But for the sake of tying the graph­ics and var­i­ous game­play modes together, we’ll fab­ri­cate a delib­er­ately flimsy one. The goal will be to hint at the theme for the most part, and let the player(s) sup­ply more of the narrative.

The game itself is a hack­ing inter­face — a highly abstracted com­mand and con­trol sys­tem for a bunch of pro­grams used to take con­trol of hosts on the inter­tubes, and defend against other hacker-​types doing the same. Most of it is auto­mated, but it needs some human input; input pro­vided in the form of fast twitch responses to highly for­mu­lated ques­tions in a 2d game envi­ron­ment! Hooray!

This con­trivance allows us to fill our game with all sorts of bright neon com­put­ery graph­ics, 3d objects in the back­ground, daz­zling powerup effects and sur­pris­ing inte­gra­tions of the game world and the inter­net (which I’ll not yet dis­cuss here).

The play­ers are two hack­ers, vying for supremacy over each other. Ini­tially con­nected to a neu­tral server, the game rolls back and forth across proxy servers until one of the hack­ers is knocked off the inter­net, their machine pwned by their opponent.

Basic Ele­ments

• Pad­dles — Rep­re­sent a player’s con­trol over the vir­tual world /​hack­ing inter­face. Powerups (and pow­er­downs) can increase or decrease the size of the pad­dle, dou­ble it, triple it, move it up or down the play­ing envi­ron­ment, or make viruballs behave strangely as they draw closer …
• Viruballs — Ini­tially just one, these are viruses sent over the inter­net, through the server both ‘hack­ers’ are cur­rently con­nected to, where they attempt to infect the other hacker. Bounc­ing them off the pad­dle destroys them and instantly launches a counter-​virus back at your oppo­nent — which hap­pens to look exactly like a bounc­ing ball! Powerups and downs can do all sorts of weird things to viruballs…
• Servers — The “level” upon which play takes place. Ini­tially a quiet and unre­spon­sive chat server, the bat­tle soon wages up and down the line of proxy servers each hacker has at their dis­posal; occa­sion­ally trig­ger­ing antivirus soft­ware, or draw­ing the atten­tion of law enforce­ment coun­ter­in­tru­sion AIs…
• Obsta­cles — highly priv­i­leged processes on the server, which hap­pen to look and behave exactly like solid brick walls. Usu­ally imper­vi­ous to harm, the viruballs bounce off them — increas­ing the com­plex­ity of their tra­jec­tory. Some are posi­tioned to obstruct player pad­dles. Some of them are null points, which absorb things that hit them…
• Powerups — all sorts of weird and won­der­ful code lives out there on the Inter­net. Some of it can be use­ful — dou­bling or mutat­ing viruballs, increas­ing their effi­ciency (speed) or giv­ing them strange prop­er­ties. Some of it can be down­right harm­ful, back­fir­ing in hor­ri­ble and unex­pected ways.
  Their use should be sub­tle, but poten­tially pow­er­ful — and highly depen­dent on the server/​level you’re in!

Graph­ics

I really wanted to demon­strate this here, but so far I haven’t come up with any­thing sat­is­fac­tory. Much of my inspi­ra­tion is drawn from the ‘cyber­space’ scenes of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Com­plex, with a lib­eral smat­ter­ing of Beat.Trip-Beat sen­si­bil­i­ties, and a touch of Geom­e­try Wars. The player should feel like they’re using some hyper­ad­vanced com­puter inter­face of joy and won­der; the under­ly­ing the­matic metaphor of ‘hack­ing’ should be con­veyed by spe­cial effects (with­out get­ting in the way of game­play, except where we WANT those effects to become part of the expe­ri­ence directly …)

Desir­able Features

• Sur­pris­ing and Inter­est­ing Inte­gra­tion with the Inter­nets (more to be dis­cussed later!)
• Mul­ti­player — tar­get iPhone OS 3.0 and its deli­cious ad-​hoc networking
• Sur­pris­ing Game­play — Mess with the estab­lished con­ven­tions; give the play­ers ongo­ing game­play puz­zles and sur­prises to overcome

Progress to Date

We have a pro­to­type work­ing, which effec­tively demon­strates the most basic game­play mech­a­nisms and the out­lines of the code struc­ture to come.

More to come! Stay posted!