Building a Pong Clone in Unity: UI and Gameplay

In Part 1 of this tutorial – the Retro Revolution: Building a Pong Clone in Unity – we created a Pong clone with basic artificial intelligence (AI) and almost no user interface (UI).

In this tutorial, we’ll build upon our previously created clone and update it so that it will look identical to classic Pong, have basic UI, and have improved gameplay.

Let’s jump right in, but first, please either go through the original tutorial, or just download the resulting project from GitHub if you’d like to follow along. (You can also view the working demo. Or, if you prefer, play the improved game, which is the result of this article.

Styling the Game

Classic Pong is traditionally black and white, so we must get rid of the colored elements in our Pong.

This also means we need to import new sprites into the Unity project (by dragging them into the Sprites folder in the Assets pane). If you’re following along, feel free to use these examples from the demo code.

After importing the new sprites into Unity, we should select both sprites in the Assets pane and change their pixels per unit to 64. We must also hit Apply for the changes to take effect.

Now that we have our images, we can start updating our Pong Clone. First, we should change the color of the Main Camera’s background to black. This can be done by clicking on the color bar next to the word Background in the Main Camera’s inspector pane. Next, we need to change the color of the paddles. We should select the Player game object in the hierarchy pane and drag the white square sprite into the Sprite attribute’s value in the Sprite Renderer element. Now we should do the same for the Enemy game object.

In order to create the nice middle bar in Pong (see below), we need to create an empty game object (right-click in hierarchy -> create empty) and name it MiddleBar. The Middle Bar game object should have an X of 0 and a Y of 0, so that it’s located in the center of the screen. We can now drag the white square sprite onto the Middle Bar game object to make white squares that are children of the Middle Bar Game object. All of the children’s X scales should be low so that they look like skinny, white sticks.

Finally, we need to change the ball’s sprite so that instead of a grey circle it will be a white circle. If we go to the the ball prefab (located in the Prefabs folder), we can select it and change its sprite as we did with the Player and Enemy, except using the white circle sprite.

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by Vincent Quarles via SitePoint