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Hello Fellow Forumers!

I have finally got the physics figured out in my Breakout/Pong Mashup game, aptly titled "PongOut!".

Whilst I do not currently have a demo of any kind, I am swiftly working to create one. I wanted to get my thread started and let everyone know where my current status was on my project, now that we're 17 days into the event.

Anyway, here's what I'm planning for the game!

- The game will feature at least several levels of brick-breaking goodness!
- When there are only a few bricks left, the game will decide on a random brick to become the opposing paddle, which will then do everything in its power to stop the player from breaking the rest of the bricks! If the opposing paddle hits a score of 21, you lose that level and are forced to restart!
- While I'm not planning on powerups at the moment, rest assured there will be some in the future!
- The entire game will be medialess, except for some sound effects, so it will barely take up any space on your hard drive at all (like that's even a concern these days )
- Each level will have a very unique design and use fancy math to make such designs possible!
- If you complete any given level in less than one minute you'll get a surprise...

Technical things of interest
I have a generic function which allows me to create a row of bricks of any length and control many parameters, such as position, size, color, and spacing. Pictured below is what is achievable just by changing the spacing of the bricks:

No Spacing


Minimal Spacing:


And LOTS of spacing to create "dashes":


I will do my best to upload a demo within the next day or two, please be patient! At least I have screenshots to post.

So there you have it! I can't wait to get this more off the ground!

I have made the paddle work and the ball responds exactly how it should on it, so this is going to start gaining traction fast!

I think I figured out a decent way to implement powerups but that's on the back-burner for the moment. The biggest thing I need to figure out is how to make the computer choose a random brick to become the paddle, and then I have to move that brick out, expand it, and tell it to start moving according to the ball's movement.

One fun idea is to base the opposing paddle's movement speed based off a percentage of the ball speed, which will increase steadily over time, so everything should scale rather nicely! I have done it before and it was not difficult at all.

I have added a temporary background image (generated in the program to keep with the medialess feature)


Legend: = Working On, = Completed, = Buggy, = Revoked Feature

- Computer choosing a random brick to become the opposing paddle
- Expanding the program to allow for powerups
- A highscore table which will automatically save at the end of a completed level
- A way to store level data

Once I have those things working a demo will not be far off! Shouldn't take too long to get there either, maybe another day or two.

Finally!

Will read up shortly...

EDIT



Indeed!

Coming along nicely man, nice!

looks fun....cant wait to try it out

Well I don't know what happened but AppGameKit seems to have corrupted my project files.

I have started recoding but I don't think I will get it done in time for the end of the month. I'm ok with this, at least I tried, and I'm still not giving up. I want to finish this game, if for no other reason than to say that I pushed through it and did it!

This is kind of a blessing in disguise because I realized that I really will need a level editor of some sort, it will actually make keeping the data easier. Plus programming each level from scratch is just a pain in the arse, and extremely repetitive.

I will make the level editor built-in, but not immediately accessible to the player. It will be hidden behind a shortcut (NOT the Konami code, way too obvious), which will make it finding it a sort of easter egg. I will work on this part of the program first, since it will be fairly easy to implement.

ALWAYS USE SOURCE CONTROL TO BACK UP YOUR DATA!

yeah... i better backup my work too! im to trusting of my pc and shouldnt be.

sorry to here that but im sure you will come back from this.
its happened to the best of us!

A quick backup on Windows is to select the entire folder and zip it... On top of any Version Control be sure to give it some incremental or date based name...

You can never have too many types of backups, I never rely on one type