After-update reflections (0.2.0)


So I published Pongus 0.2.0 version and want to share some experience I got when making this one.

Firstly, I want to say that I had a victory trying to make the controlls feel more responsive and less buggy with racket stuttering when pressing multiple arrows. All thanks go to the guy, who answered this question https://godotengine.org/qa/38355/how-can-i-script-smooth-movement-for-kinematicbody2d. As I am no professional programmer, I have troubles finding better coding sollutions, so I ended up having if-else system for movement input. This is slow and requires some accuracy when writing. In my case it didn't support multiple key presses and I couldn't make this work as I wanted. Then I looked for sollutions and found this one which I consider beautiful in some way. That piece of code really makes  movement smooth. Much appreciated.

Secondly, Godot does not support MP3 files, which is a shame as I wanted to compress wav. format to make the game weigh less. Personally I think, that projects need to be cleaned up from time to time from garbage files to keep an adequate volume. Also, it prevents confusion, that's why I did this in last update, however to my shame I was too lazy to make a better file system to keep my scripts separate. Hope that I'll do that later or my project will become a mess.

Made nice animations for Defence gamemode. Meteors blow away. When doing this I understood that AnimationPlayer is your not only, but very best friend. It's a very powerful tool and I regret ignoring it before. It allows you to avoid some cumbersome coding apart from being like...you know...animation player playing animations.

I want to add that as I made some better animations and visuals for the game, some understanding came to me. I always knew that visual stuff is really important for a game to feel good. Untill this update I hadn't realised how much this affects the actual game. With animations it is a lot better and gains extra points of fun even when gameplay is primitive. For that reason I want to include one guy, whose game I have found recently when surfing the Ludum Dare 46 page. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/goofball This is as in my case a clone of a classic arcade game. Here he made a good job creating impact and nice animations for the game. Here you can actually see how much those do for basically any kind of game. Never underestimate them.

And yeah, I participated in LD46 Compo. Here's my game for the challenge https://wans24.itch.io/he-needs-healing. I think that I'll make a post about my LD46 experience some time later.

Files

Pongus 0.2.0.zip 14 MB
Apr 17, 2020

Get Pongus

Comments

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I got an error trying to play the web version in Firefox: ‘abort(114). Build with -s ASSERTIONS=1 for more info.’

It worked in the Chrome browser though.

I played a match and think it would be nice to have either a start-instruction or the game (the timer) would start automatically. I needed a few moments until I found the spacebar had to be pressed.

Maybe you can make the pads a bit faster, so the match can last longer. The ball would increase its speed over time.

It would also be cool, if you could add a few more options for colors for pads and ball. Generally that is a nice feature.

Looking forward, what you will add to really make it differ from the usual classical Pong. Defence mode was definitly one of them. An online multiplayer mode would be perfect but I know it is harder to implement than to think about it.

(1 edit)

Thanks for playing) Actually, I missed some things when exporting the last update, so the instruction in the beginning is already there, but not showing (will fix that later). The ball is speeding up over time, I think that I will change the default pad speed. I will add more pads and maybe something for advanced customization. Online multiplayer sounds like pain for me, I thought about it already, but it will be a challenge. Maybe, sometime later hah. Again, thanks for checking the game out)