Flappy Pong (Advanced)
BY OGUZ GELAL - FREELANCE SOFTWARE ENGINEER @ TOPTAL
In this article, I will show you how to use P5.js to implement your own game, step by step. Each step will be explained in detail. Then, we will port the game to the web.
P5.JS Tutorial: A Simple Game
The game we will build in this P5 tutorial is sort of a combination of Flappy Bird, Pong and Brick Breaker. The reason I picked a game like this is that it has most of the concepts that beginners struggle with when learning game development. This is based on my experience from when I was a teaching assistant, helping new programmers learn how to use P5. These concepts include gravity, collisions, keeping scores, handling different screens and keyboard/mouse interactions. Flappy Pong has all of them in it.
Without using object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts, it is not easy to build complex games, such as platform games with multiple levels, players, entities etc. As we move along, you’ll see how the code gets complicated really fast. I did my best to keep this Processing tutorial organised and simple.
I advise you to follow the article, grab the full code, play with it on your own, start thinking about your own game as quickly as possible, and start implementing it.
So let’s begin.
Building Flappy Pong
Tutorial Step #1: Initialize & Handle Different Screens
The first step is to initialize our project. For starters, we will write our setup and draw blocks as usual, nothing fancy or new. Then, we will handle different screens (initial screen, game screen, game over screen etc.). So the question arises, how do we make Processing show the correct page at the correct time?
Accomplishing this task is fairly simple. We will have a global variable that stores the information of the currently active screen. We then draw the contents of the correct screen depending on the variable. In the draw block, we will have an if statement that checks the variable and displays the contents of the screen accordingly. Whenever we want to change the screen, we will change that variable to the identifier of screen we want it to display. With that said, here is what our skeleton code looks like:
/********* VARIABLES *********/
// We control which screen is active by settings / updating
// gameScreen variable. We display the correct screen according
// to the value of this variable.
//
// 0: Initial Screen
// 1: Game Screen
// 2: Game-over Screen
var gameScreen = 0;
/********* SETUP BLOCK *********/
function setup() {
createCanvas(500, 500);
}
/********* DRAW BLOCK *********/
function draw() {
// Display the contents of the current screen
if (gameScreen == 0) {
initScreen();
} else if (gameScreen == 1) {
gamePlayScreen();
} else if (gameScreen == 2) {
gameOverScreen();
}
}
/********* SCREEN CONTENTS *********/
function initScreen() {
// codes of initial screen
}
function gamePlayScreen() {
// codes of game screen
}
function gameOverScreen() {
// codes for game over screen
}
/********* INPUTS *********/
function mousePressed() {
// if we are on the initial screen when clicked, start the game
if (gameScreen==0) {
startGame();
}
}
/********* OTHER FUNCTIONS *********/
// This function sets the necessary variables to start the game
function startGame() {
gameScreen=1;
}
This may look scary at first, but all we did is build the basic structure and separate different parts with comment blocks.
As you can see, we define a different function for each screen to display. In our draw block, we simply check the value of our gameScreen variable, and call the corresponding function.
In the function mousePressed(){...} part, we are listening to mouse clicks and if the active screen is 0, the initial screen, we call the startGame() function which starts the game as you’d expect. The first line of this function changes gameScreen variable to 1, the game screen.
If this is understood, the next step is to implement our initial screen. To do that, we will be editing the initScreen() function. Here it goes:
function initScreen() {
background(0);
textAlign(CENTER);
text("Click to start", height/2, width/2);
}
Now our initial screen has a black background and a simple text, “Click to start”, located in the middle and aligned to the center. But when we click, nothing happens. We haven’t yet specified any content for our game screen. The function gamePlayScreen() doesn’t have anything in it, so we aren’t covering the previous contents drawn from the last screen (the text) by having background() as the first line of draw. That’s why the text is still there, even though the text() line is not being called anymore (just like the moving ball example from the last part which was leaving a trace behind). The background is still black for the same reason. So let’s go ahead and begin implementing the game screen.
function gamePlayScreen() {
background(255);
}
After this change, you will notice that the background turns white & the text disappears.
Tutorial Step #2: Creating the Ball & Implementing Gravity
Now, we will start working on the game screen. We will first create our ball. We should define variables for its coordinates, color and size because we might want to change those values later on. For instance, if we want to increase the size of the ball as the player scores higher so that the game will be harder. We will need to change its size, so it should be a variable. We will define speed of the ball as well, after we implement gravity.
First, let’s add the following:
...
var ballX, ballY;
var ballSize = 20;
var ballColor = 0;
...
function setup() {
...
ballX=width/4;
ballY=height/5;
}
...
function gamePlayScreen() {
...
drawBall();
}
...
function drawBall() {
fill(ballColor);
ellipse(ballX, ballY, ballSize, ballSize);
}
We defined the coordinates as global variables, created a function that draw the ball, called from gameScreen function. Only thing to pay attention to here is that we initialized coordinates, but we defined them in setup(). The reason we did that is we wanted the ball to start at one fourth from left and one fifth from top. There is no particular reason we want that, but that is a good point for the ball to start. So we needed to get the width and height of the sketch dynamically. The sketch size is defined in setup(), after the first line. width and height are not set before setup() runs, that’s why we couldn’t achieve this if we defined the variables on top.
Gravity
Now implementing gravity is actually the easy part. There are only a few tricks. Here is the implementation first:
...
var gravity = 1;
var ballSpeedVert = 0;
...
function gamePlayScreen() {
...
applyGravity();
keepInScreen();
}
...
function applyGravity() {
ballSpeedVert += gravity;
ballY += ballSpeedVert;
}
function makeBounceBottom(surface) {
ballY = surface-(ballSize/2);
ballSpeedVert*=-1;
}
function makeBounceTop(surface) {
ballY = surface+(ballSize/2);
ballSpeedVert*=-1;
}
// keep ball in the screen
function keepInScreen() {
// ball hits floor
if (ballY+(ballSize/2) > height) {
makeBounceBottom(height);
}
// ball hits ceiling
if (ballY-(ballSize/2) < 0) {
makeBounceTop(0);
}
}
And the result is:
Hold your horses, physicist. I know that’s not how gravity works in real life. Instead, this is more of an animation process than anything. The variable we defined as gravity is just a numeric value—that we add to ballSpeedVert on every loop. And ballSpeedVert is the vertical speed of the ball, which is added to the Y coordinate of the ball (ballY) on each loop. We watch the coordinates of the ball and make sure it stays in the screen. If we didn’t, the ball would fall to infinity. For now, our ball only moves vertically. So we watch the floor and ceiling boundries of the screen. With keepInScreen() method, we check if ballY (+ the radius) is less than height, and similarly ballY (- the radius) is more than 0. If the conditions don’t meet, we make the ball bounce (from the bottom or the top) with makeBounceBottom() and makeBounceTop() methods. To make the ball bounce, we simply move the ball to the exact location where it had to bounce and multiply the vertical speed (ballSpeedVert) with -1(multiplying with -1 changes the sign). When the speed value has a minus sign, adding Y coordinate the speed becomes ballY + (-ballSpeedVert), which is ballY - ballSpeedVert. So the ball immediately changes its direction with the same speed. Then, as we add gravity to ballSpeedVert and ballSpeedVert has a negative value, it starts to get close to 0, eventually becomes 0, and starts increasing again. That makes the ball rise, rise slower, stop and start falling.
There is a problem with our animation process, though—the ball keeps bouncing. If this were a real-world scenario, the ball would have faced air resistance and friction every time it touched a surface. That’s the behavior we want for our game’s animation process, so implementing this is easy. We add the following:
...
var airfriction = 0.0001;
var friction = 0.1;
...
function applyGravity() {
...
ballSpeedVert -= (ballSpeedVert * airfriction);
}
function makeBounceBottom(surface) {
...
ballSpeedVert -= (ballSpeedVert * friction);
}
function makeBounceTop(surface) {
...
ballSpeedVert -= (ballSpeedVert * friction);
}
And now our animation process produces this:
As the name suggests, friction is the surface friction and airfriction is the friction of air. So obviously, friction has to apply each time the ball touches any surface. airfriction however has to apply constantly. So that’s what we did. applyGravity() function runs on each loop, so we take away 0.0001 percent of its current value from ballSpeedVert on every loop. makeBounceBottom() and makeBounceTop() methods run when the ball touches any surface. So in those methods, we did the same thing, only this time with friction.
Tutorial Step #3: Creating the Racket
Now we need a racket for the ball to bounce on. We should be controlling the racket. Let’s make it controllable with the mouse. Here is the code:
...
var racketColor = 0;
var racketWidth = 100;
var racketHeight = 10;
...
function gamePlayScreen() {
...
drawRacket();
...
}
...
function drawRacket(){
fill(racketColor);
rectMode(CENTER);
rect(mouseX, mouseY, racketWidth, racketHeight);
}
We defined the color, width and height of the racket as a global variable, we might want them to change during gameplay. We implemented a function drawRacket() which does what its name suggests. We set the rectMode to center, so our racket is aligned to the center of our cursor.
Now that we created the racket, we have to make the ball bounce on it.
...
var racketBounceRate = 20;
...
function gamePlayScreen() {
...
watchRacketBounce();
...
}
...
function watchRacketBounce() {
var overhead = mouseY - pmouseY;
if ((ballX+(ballSize/2) > mouseX-(racketWidth/2)) && (ballX-(ballSize/2) < mouseX+(racketWidth/2))) {
if (dist(ballX, ballY, ballX, mouseY)<=(ballSize/2)+abs(overhead)) {
makeBounceBottom(mouseY);
// racket moving up
if (overhead<0) {
ballY+=overhead;
ballSpeedVert+=overhead;
}
}
}
}
And here is the result:
So what watchRacketBounce() does is it makes sure that the racket and the ball collides. There are two things to check here, which is if the ball and racket lined up both vertically and horizontally. The first if statement checks if the X coordinate of the right side of the ball is greater than the X coordinate of the left side of the racket (and the other way around). If it is, second statement checks if the distance between the ball and the racket is smaller than or equal to the radius of the ball (which means they are colliding). So if these conditions meet, makeBounceBottom() function gets called and the ball bounces on our racket (at mouseY, where the racket is).
Have you noticed the variable overhead which is calculated by mouseY - pmouseY? pmouseX and pmouseYvariables store the coordinates of the mouse at the previous frame. As the mouse can move very fast, there is a good chance we might not detect the distance between the ball and the racket correctly in between frames if the mouse is moving towards the ball fast enough. So, we take the difference of the mouse coordinates in between frames and take that into account while detecting distance. The the faster mouse is moving, the greater distance is acceptable.
We also use overhead for another reason. We detect which way the mouse is moving by checking the sign of overhead. If overhead is negative, the mouse was somewhere below in the previous frame so our mouse (racket) is moving up. In that case, we want to add an extra speed to the ball and move it a little further than regular bounce to simulate the effect of hitting the ball with the racket. If overhead is less than 0, we add it to ballY and ballSpeedVert to make the ball go higher and faster. So the faster the racket hits the ball, the higher and faster it will move up.
Tutorial Step #4: Horizontal Movement & Controlling the Ball
In this section, we will add horizontal movement to the ball. Then, we will make it possible to control the ball horizontally with our racket. Here we go:
...
// we will start with 0, but for we give 10 just for testing
var ballSpeedHorizon = 10;
...
function gamePlayScreen() {
...
applyHorizontalSpeed();
...
}
...
function applyHorizontalSpeed(){
ballX += ballSpeedHorizon;
ballSpeedHorizon -= (ballSpeedHorizon * airfriction);
}
function makeBounceLeft(surface){
ballX = surface+(ballSize/2);
ballSpeedHorizon*=-1;
ballSpeedHorizon -= (ballSpeedHorizon * friction);
}
function makeBounceRight(surface){
ballX = surface-(ballSize/2);
ballSpeedHorizon*=-1;
ballSpeedHorizon -= (ballSpeedHorizon * friction);
}
...
function keepInScreen() {
...
if (ballX-(ballSize/2) < 0){
makeBounceLeft(0);
}
if (ballX+(ballSize/2) > width){
makeBounceRight(width);
}
}
And the result is:
The idea here is the same as what we did for vertical movement. We created a horizontal speed variable, ballSpeedHorizon. We created a function to apply horizontal speed to ballX and take away the air friction. We added two more if statements to the keepInScreen() function which will watch the ball for hitting the left and right edges of the screen. Finally we created makeBounceLeft() and makeBounceRight() functions to handle the bounces from left and right.
Now that we added horizontal speed to the game, we want to control the ball with the racket. As in the famous Atari game Breakout and in all other brick breaking games, the ball should go left or right according to the point on the racket it hits. The edges of the racket should give the ball more horizontal speed whereas the middle shouldn’t have any effect. Code first:
function watchRacketBounce() {
...
if ((ballX+(ballSize/2) > mouseX-(racketWidth/2)) && (ballX-(ballSize/2) < mouseX+(racketWidth/2))) {
if (dist(ballX, ballY, ballX, mouseY)<=(ballSize/2)+abs(overhead)) {
...
ballSpeedHorizon = (ballX - mouseX)/5;
...
}
}
}
The result is:
Adding that simple line to the watchRacketBounce() did the job. What we did is we determined the distance of the point that the ball hits from the center of the racket with ballX - mouseX. Then, we make it the horizontal speed. The actual difference was too much, so I gave it a few tries and figured that one-tenth of the value feels the most natural.
Tutorial Step #5: Creating the Walls
Our sketch is starting to look more like a game with each step. In this step, we will add walls moving towards the left, just like in Flappy Bird:
...
var wallSpeed = 5;
var wallInterval = 1000;
var lastAddTime = 0;
var minGapHeight = 200;
var maxGapHeight = 300;
var wallWidth = 80;
var wallColors = 0;
// This array stores data of the gaps between the walls. Actuals walls are drawn accordingly.
// [gapWallX, gapWallY, gapWallWidth, gapWallHeight]
var walls = [];
...
function gamePlayScreen() {
...
wallAdder();
wallHandler();
}
...
function wallAdder() {
if (millis()-lastAddTime > wallInterval) {
var randHeight = round(random(minGapHeight, maxGapHeight));
var randY = round(random(0, height-randHeight));
// {gapWallX, gapWallY, gapWallWidth, gapWallHeight}
var randWall = [width, randY, wallWidth, randHeight, 0];
walls.push(randWall);
lastAddTime = millis();
}
}
function wallHandler() {
for (var i = 0; i < walls.length; i++) {
wallRemover(i);
wallMover(i);
wallDrawer(i);
}
}
function wallDrawer(index) {
var wall = walls[index];
// get gap wall settings
var gapWallX = wall[0];
var gapWallY = wall[1];
var gapWallWidth = wall[2];
var gapWallHeight = wall[3];
// draw actual walls
rectMode(CORNER);
fill(wallColors);
rect(gapWallX, 0, gapWallWidth, gapWallY);
rect(gapWallX, gapWallY+gapWallHeight, gapWallWidth, height-(gapWallY+gapWallHeight));
}
function wallMover(index) {
var wall = walls[index];
wall[0] -= wallSpeed;
}
function wallRemover(index) {
var wall = walls[index];
if (wall[0]+wall[2] <= 0) {
walls.splice(index,1);
}
}
And this resulted in:
Even though the code looks long and intimidating, I promise there is nothing hard to understand. The data we keep in the arrays are for the gap between two walls. The arrays contain the following values:
[gap wall X, gap wall Y, gap wall width, gap wall height]
The actual walls are drawn based on the gap wall values. Note that all these could be handled better and cleaner using classes, but since the use of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is not in the scope of this Processing tutorial, this is how we’ll handle it. We have two base methods to manage the walls, wallAdder()and wallHandler.
wallAdder() method simply adds new walls in every wallInterval millisecond to the array. We have a global variable lastAddTime which stores the time when the last wall was added (in milliseconds). If the current millisecond millis() minus the last added millisecond lastAddTime is larger than our interval value wallInterval, it means it is now time to add a new wall. Random gap variables are then generated based on the global variables defined at the very top. Then a new wall (integer array that stores the gap wall data) is added into the array and the lastAddTime is set to the current millisecond millis().
wallHandler() loops through the current walls that is in the array. And for each item at each loop, it calls wallRemover(i), wallMover(i) and wallDrawer(i) by the index value of the array. These methods do what their name suggests. wallDrawer() draws the actual walls based on the gap wall data. It grabs the wall data array from the array, and calls rect() method to draw the walls to where they should actually be. wallMover() method grabs the element from the array, changes its X location based on the wallSpeed global variable. Finally, wallRemover() removes the walls from the array which are out of the screen. If we didn’t do that, Processing would have treated them as they are still in the screen. And that would have been a huge loss in performance. So when a wall is removed from the array, it doesn’t get drawn on subsequent loops.
The final challenging thing left to do is to detect collisions between the ball and the walls.
function wallHandler() {
for (var i = 0; i < walls.length; i++) {
...
watchWallCollision(i);
}
}
...
function watchWallCollision(var index) {
var wall = walls[index];
// get gap wall settings
var gapWallX = wall[0];
var gapWallY = wall[1];
var gapWallWidth = wall[2];
var gapWallHeight = wall[3];
var wallTopX = gapWallX;
var wallTopY = 0;
var wallTopWidth = gapWallWidth;
var wallTopHeight = gapWallY;
var wallBottomX = gapWallX;
var wallBottomY = gapWallY+gapWallHeight;
var wallBottomWidth = gapWallWidth;
var wallBottomHeight = height-(gapWallY+gapWallHeight);
if (
(ballX+(ballSize/2)>wallTopX) &&
(ballX-(ballSize/2)<wallTopX+wallTopWidth) &&
(ballY+(ballSize/2)>wallTopY) &&
(ballY-(ballSize/2)<wallTopY+wallTopHeight)
) {
// collides with upper wall
}
if (
(ballX+(ballSize/2)>wallBottomX) &&
(ballX-(ballSize/2)<wallBottomX+wallBottomWidth) &&
(ballY+(ballSize/2)>wallBottomY) &&
(ballY-(ballSize/2)<wallBottomY+wallBottomHeight)
) {
// collides with lower wall
}
}
watchWallCollision() function gets called for each wall on each loop. We grab the coordinates of the gap wall, calculate the coordinates of the actual walls (top and bottom) and we check if the coordinates of the ball collides with the walls.
Tutorial Step #6: Health and Score
Now that we can detect the collisions of the ball and the walls, we can decide on the game mechanics. After some tuning to the game, I managed to make the game somewhat playable. But still, it was very hard. My first thought on the game was to make it like Flappy Bird, when the ball touches the walls, game ends. But then I realised it would be impossible to play. So here is what I thought:
There should be a health bar on top of the ball. The ball should lose health while it is touching the walls. With this logic, it doesn’t make sense to make the ball bounce back from the walls. So when the health is 0, the game should end and we should switch to the game over screen. So here we go:
var maxHealth = 100;
var health = 100;
var healthDecrease = 1;
var healthBarWidth = 60;
...
function gamePlayScreen() {
...
drawHealthBar();
...
}
...
function drawHealthBar() {
// Make it borderless:
noStroke();
fill(236, 240, 241);
rectMode(CORNER);
rect(ballX-(healthBarWidth/2), ballY - 30, healthBarWidth, 5);
if (health > 60) {
fill(46, 204, 113);
} else if (health > 30) {
fill(230, 126, 34);
} else {
fill(231, 76, 60);
}
rectMode(CORNER);
rect(ballX-(healthBarWidth/2), ballY - 30, healthBarWidth*(health/maxHealth), 5);
}
function decreaseHealth(){
health -= healthDecrease;
if (health <= 0){
gameOver();
}
}
And here is a simple run:
We created a global variable health to keep the health of the ball. And then created a method drawHealthBar() which draws two rectangles on top of the ball. First one is the base health bar, other is the active one that shows the current health. The width of the second one is dynamic, and is calculated with healthBarWidth*(health/maxHealth), the ratio of our current health with respect to the width of the health bar. Finally, the fill colors are set according to the value of health. Last but not the least, scores:
...
function gameOverScreen() {
background(0);
textAlign(CENTER);
fill(255);
textSize(30);
text("Game Over", height/2, width/2 - 20);
textSize(15);
text("Click to Restart", height/2, width/2 + 10);
}
...
function wallAdder() {
if (millis()-lastAddTime > wallInterval) {
...
// added another value at the end of the array
var randWall = [width, randY, wallWidth, randHeight, 0];
...
}
}
function watchWallCollision(index) {
...
var wallScored = wall[4];
...
if (ballX > gapWallX+(gapWallWidth/2) && wallScored==0) {
wallScored=1;
wall[4]=1;
addScore();
}
}
function addScore() {
score++;
}
function printScore(){
textAlign(CENTER);
fill(0);
textSize(30);
text(score, height/2, 50);
}
We needed to score when the ball passes a wall. But we need to add maximum 1 score per wall. Meaning, if the ball passes a wall than goes back and passes it again, another score shouldn’t be added. To achieve this, we added another variable to the gap wall array within the arraylist. The new variable stores 0 if the ball didn’t yet pass that wall and 1 if it did. Then, we modified the watchWallCollision() method. We added a condition that fires addScore() method and marks the wall as passed when the ball passes a wall which it has not passed before.
We are now very close to the end. The last thing to do is implement click to restart on the game over screen. We need to set all the variables we used to their initial value, and restart the game. Here it is:
...
function mousePressed() {
...
if (gameScreen==2){
restart();
}
}
...
function restart() {
score = 0;
health = maxHealth;
ballX=width/4;
ballY=height/5;
lastAddTime = 0;
walls=[];
gameScreen = 0;
}
Let’s add some more colors.
Voila! We have Flappy Pong!