SDL Pong
As a primer to working with SDL I ended up making pong - naturally with some differences to the original, but pong nonetheless. It was definitely a “tutorial” game - heck, the font used is from Lazy Foo’ Production’s tutorials, as is some of the code - but an excellent way to get to programming without a pre-made engine.
Controls: WASD for left player, arrow keys for right player, R resets.
Features:
- Paddles can move in all directions
- No score limit - play as long as you like!
- Hitting the ball while moving forward/back changes its speed - use this to do power shots or deaden it so you can aim better.
- Paddle size & speed changes for both players based on how they’re performing.
- Ball speeds up the longer you play
While it was good to make this, I’m most likely to end up using OpenGL for graphics next game - SDL is too limited for most (gaming) applications. It will still be there, mostly for keyboard and mouse events, but little else. I still want to revive Xonic (pronounced ex-zonic, though that’s no longer its official name), whether for iPhone or for free - it’s one of the few remaining games I can think of that work really well with multiple people on the same system and makes for some frantic battles!
