Space Pong Devlog

My version of Pong for Assignment #1, KIT109 Sem1 2025. I experimented with adding more interesting sprites for the walls/paddles, but felt they didn't match the simple aesthetic, so left them flat white.

Features Included:

• Basic features like paddle control (Player 1: W & S, Player 2: Up & Down) and ball reset.
• Paddles constrained to game area.
• Ball resets to middle after a 1 second wait, and is moved in a random direction left or right, at a random angle (constrained to within 45deg up or down).
• Score is tracked, plus shown and updated in on-screen UI.
• First player to 10 points wins, upon which game is halted and a UI screen is shown to declare the winner, with buttons on the Game Over UI to either reset/restart or return to Main Menu.
• Main Menu to select between Single Player or Two Player. If Two Player is selected, second player controls the right paddle with Up and Down arrows on the keyboard.
• If Single Player is selected, a rudimentary AI controls the right paddle, by tracking the ball Y position & imparting force on the paddle to try and match the ball position.
• Ball slowly increases in speed with every paddle hit, and resets to starting speed when returned to middle.
• Return bounce angle is changed depending on the location that the ball hits a paddle. The further away from centre it hits, the more angle is applied.
• Sound effects for button clicks, starting a game, ball to paddle/wall hits, ball reset, and game over.
• Ambient SFX or background music for main menu & the game
• Scrolling (parallax?) seamlessly tiled background (stars also move independently from base background layer)

Fun Fact/Idea:

I planned on going for a more physics-heavy gameplay including curve-balls, by using friction applied between a moving paddle and the ball to apply rotation/curve, and possibly also implementing some version of the magnus effect. In the end I couldn't get it working reliably and shelved the idea - focusing more on polish. Way too many wacky bugs.

Sources:

SFX:

• Ball Bounce, Ball Off-Screen, Ball Spawn, Game Start, Game End: Chiptone sound generator https://sfbgames.itch.io/chiptone
• Button Click: UI Click Sound: ui-click-43196 by freesound_community from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/ui-click-43196/
• Menu Ambient Sound: space-sound-hi-109577.mp3 by LIECIO from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/space-sound-hi-109577/
• Main Game Background Music: gamemusic-6082.mp3 by Magntron (Freesound) from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/gamemusic-6082/

Sprites & Art:

All drawn/made by me in Photoshop. Inspiration for the background from “Vector Space Backgrounds” on Google Images & Adobe stock, but still drawn by myself.

Font In-Game:

Vividly by “Tata”  https://www.dafont.com/vividly.font

Additional Help & Resources:

• Scrolling Background & Custom UI Buttons: How to make a menu in Unity - UI by Tarodev on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF26yGJbsQk
• Sound Effects: How To Add Sound Effects the RIGHT Way by Sasquatch B Studios https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU7cgVsU2rM
  

Generative AI:

Space Pong was coded in C#, with some help from ChatGPT (4o model). ChatGPT was used to converse with & treated as an additional learning tool, and provided some code examples with comprehensive comments and explanation.

Paddle control, influencing bound angle, and ball instantiating + moving in random direction: https://chatgpt.com/share/67d577e3-0984-8011-859d-dbcb79207d71

Help with linking scripts on a dynamically instantiated GameObject: https://chatgpt.com/share/67d57408-09dc-8011-a356-42efb92a6c6e

Helping add AI to the PaddleController script, and storing settings that can be modified and accessed across scenes: https://chatgpt.com/share/67d2c101-de9c-8011-95e6-2173eadf148c

Smoothly rotating & pulsing UI element https://chatgpt.com/share/67d5873f-5978-8011-99d6-eaf60a5667aa