The Start #
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I decided to try tackling *The 20 Games Challenge to foster my game development skills and knowledge. I started by developing the first game on the list, the arcade classic: Pong from 1972. I imagined that because I already have some knowledge I would develop it in a day or so… ohhh… was I wrong. For starters I planned to add some modern fun mods before realizing I dind’t even knew what nodes I should actually be using (probably somebody out there will see which ones I chose to use in the end and scream at me).
So, during the first few days I tried the challenge I was able to learn how to assign players to different controllers without having to hardcode the behavior, I also learned how to make sure UI works with just using the controllers so the game is fully playable with eaither keyboard or controllers and of course this allows the game to be playable by two local players.
In the second week of development I decided to add a main menu graphic as a placeholder at least as I want to fully publish this game for free on Itchio and I want it to look nice.
From the beginning I actually thought of adding a twist to the game and by player testing I came up with a very simple literal idea for a first game mode different to the original Pong gameplay (Of course during previous research I actaully learned that Pong had different modes and I actually started to mentally overscope so I could have those modes and implement mine): a simple twist of the players’ palettes. So this twist also gave me the game’s title justification without overscoping: Twisted Pong. Maybe I’ll add more modes in the near future if I get some time off.