For the Glory and Honor, we bring you; The First Even Open Source Coding Challenge!
This challenge's theme is Pong and is due January 16th, 2009.
THE DISCUSSION Are you having any problems writing your code? Ask for help here before submitting your final project.
Was there anything you liked or would like to point out about your own or someone else's code?
Who do you think deserves to win so far, and why?
Do not post any of this information in the Submissions thread! Instead, post here. Non developers are more than welcome to join in the discussion.
JUDGING Players may judge even if they submitted a game, and even if they are not programmers. Please keep an open mind, and to not be too overly obsessed with your own code to accept anyone else's success.
Unless no agreement can be made, there is no official voting. Instead, the winner will be selected based on a general consensus. The real discussion will be done on the 17th and 18th (but feel free to post your opinions before that), and a winner will be selected on the 19th.
OTHER CONCERNS Also, should we allow developers to submit more than one game, since there are perhaps not very many developers?
Also, can anyone get ahold of some experienced developers who would be willing to join in the challenge?
I will be setting up an official site somewhere where you can view all submitted content from past challenges which you can learn from.
@ Awoogamuffin: It would be great if you finished up with a code that could erase the paint spots everywhere... I played until 30, and I couldn't see the ball XD
Shintetsu - I think that's only psychological, as in your brain gets distracted by all the colours, or maybe because you start to focus more on the tail than on the ball itself.
In any case, I think I want to add another power up which makes the ball leave a black ink trail, thereby allowing the background to go black again in a sort of natural way...
And anybody with idea for funky powerups, give me a shout. I think I'll take that week extension to add a few more features, including AI...
My Pong games keep wandering away from Pong rather than towards it. The first game started out as an attempt at coding up the "make a ball bounce off of arbitrary lines" project that was mentioned prior to the Pong challenge being officially about Pong. However, as a stop-gap, I used hitTestObject, so it wound up being a ball bouncing off of arbitrary boxes. Before I could fix the hit test code, I got distracted by bitmap filters, and I wound up giving up on that.
My second attempt get even further from the Pong concept. Don't laugh, but it's actually more of a dress-up game with tooltips. I'm not quite sure how that happened.
At this rate, my third attempt will be a MMOG where you breed spiders and sew their web into tiny outfits that you sell in the Gnome Kingdom in exchange for pixie dust and berry juice.
Anyway, for anyone who's curious, here's the first two attempts: Pong stuff
They're both on the same page, so scroll down to get to the second one. Controls for the top one are +/- on the number pad to change the speed and 'c' to clear all the boxes. Click-and-drag to make a new box. For the bottom one, just click-and-drag components from the right on to the paddle at the left. Clicking on the white box in the upper-left corner toggles between full and half-size -- that's so I could see how it'd look shrunk down which is what I was planning for in the game. If you mouse over the components, you'll get a tooltip, but it's currently broken for the plain component as I haven't fixed it for excessively long text, yet.
Anyway, it's not much so don't expect anything special. It's more just me playing around with random things that catch my attention rather than proper progress toward an actual Pong game.
