Coding Challenge #36 - Pong

For as long as I have been interested in programming, programmers have been learning by building computer games. Many of us start with Pong and over time progress to either copying other more complex games, building our own from scratch or customising existing games.

I certainly spent a lot of my childhood cloning Sensible Soccer and Alien Breed before moving on to writing ‘AI’ based bots for Quake, Quake 2 and Quake 4.

A first step on the journey however is to build a simple game like Pong.

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The Challenge - Building Pong

If somehow you’ve never heard of Pong, it is a table tennis-themed game that Atari originally released in 1972. It was apparently the first commercially successful computer game and a key part of establishing the computer gaming industry.

It has simple graphics, with each player controlling a paddle and a ball that bounces across the screen between the players. If a player misses the ball, a point is scored against them.

Step Zero

In this step you decide which programming language and development environment you’re going to use. This would be a great project to try a frontend stack if you’re a backend developer and vice versa.

If you’re from a data engineering or site-reliability engineering background you could leverage your knowledge of Python with PyGame or Go with Ebitenegine. Rustaceans can check out are we game yet for useful crates. In short as Pong is relatively simple and as such, it’s a great platform for learning a new technology, or programming language.

Step 1

In this step your goal is to create program and draw the ‘table’, usually it’s quite a simple table with a vertical line down the middle. Something as simple as this will do:

Continued...

You can find Step 2 and beyond on the?Coding Challenges?website as write your own Pong.

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