Space Pong


Project Summary

Space Pong.mp4

Description

PONG IN SPACE! Space Pong is my first rapid game development project. Reflect the energy bolt toward the alien spaceship to do damage. The paddle is your life! Taking damage or missing the energy bolt will shrink the length of the paddle. When the bolt hits a block or spaceship, you get combo points. When you have maximum combo points, you can even summon two giant laser cannons to aid you in combat.

Game Engine: Unity.

Project duration: 2 days.

Space Pong was my first rapid development project. I was responsible for designing and scripting pong physics, power-ups, space cannon mechanics, scoring system, and enemy attacks in C#. All the sprites were found on the internet.

Project Development

Space Cannon

To make the game more exciting, I added a combo system. When the energy bolt hits a block or spaceship, you get a combo point. To get high combo points, the energy bolt needs to hit multiple targets in short succession. Once the combo points reach x10, you can summon two space cannons that do a large amount of damage to the boss.

Power-Ups

Destroying blocks in the center of the arena drops power-ups.

  1. The red lighting symbol means power. It makes the energy bolt do more damage to both the boss and the blocks.

  2. Green cross repairs paddle. It heals 1 HP.

  3. The time symbol is speed. It increases how fast the energy bolt can move.

Blocksthat are destroyed will respawn after 50 seconds.

Heal

Power

Speed

Player HP

Player HP scales with the length of the paddle. The longer it is, the more HPs you have. Players have 7 HPs in total. Having lower HPs not only makes it harder for you to catch the energy bolt, but it only limits the angles that you can reflect the bolt.

Things I learned

Reducing the length of the paddle every time players take a hit creates a positive loop. It's harder to reflect the bolt with a tiny paddle. To get healing items, you have to destroy the block. To quickly destroy a block, you need to make the bolt bounce off multiple surfaces in a short time, which is difficult when the paddle is so short (when your HP is only one, you have only one reflecting angle, which is a 90-degree angle). Not only that, power-ups spawns are random. You may get a power or speed buff instead of a healing item.

To resolve the issue, I added a system that automatically generates your HP when your HP reaches 1. You can automatically regenerate to 3 HPs after a set amount of time.

Your HPs auto regenerate when they are low

However, I don't think this solves the problem. Alternatively, I could grantee a destroyed block to spawn a healing item when players' HPs are low. Or increase the bolt's damage when players' HPs are low.

Another issue is that the bolt could constantly bounce between two diagonal walls when there are no blocks in between to change the bolt's trajectory. An easy fix would be reducing the respawn delay of the blocks.