Retro Revolution: Building a Pong Clone in Unity

Before starting you can view the game at itch.io

Analyzing Pong

Pong was one of the first video games ever made and was the first successful commercial game. When Pong was first created the developers most likely struggled with the logic for the code, however, nowadays you can make a simple two player Pong with one method call, colliders, and sprites. Pong gets harder to create once the decision to make a one-player Pong is made. In this tutorial, we will create the base gameplay for Pong and break down a very simple AI alternative that still adds to gameplay value.

We must ask, what are the core elements of Pong gameplay? Here is a list with the answer to that question:

1. Player Input - We want the player to be able to move their paddle up and down so that they can hit the ball.
2. Ball Collision - When the ball hits the paddle or boundaries it can’t be allowed to lose any speed.
3. Boundary Collision - The ball has to be able to bounce off of the top and bottom part of the screen so that it doesn’t leave the play area.
4. Enemy AI - The gameplay value of the game would be next to zero if the enemy sat on the opposite end of the screen and didn’t move.
5. Spawning the Ball - When the ball hits one of the boundaries behind the paddles we need it to respawn so that we can continue the game.
6. Ball to Paddle Hit Area Detection - This allows for the ball to bounce off the paddle at unique angles so that we are able to to better aim the ball when it is hit with the paddle.

With this list we can beginning programming the game.

Note that any numbers used relating to a game object’s location, rotation, scale, etc are relative and may need to be changed for your specific setup.

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Appserver – Server Configuration, Dir Structure and Threads

In the first part of our Appserver series, we discussed the very high level differences of Appserver’s architecture to standard web server stacks and got you up and running with an Appserver instance. If you missed that part, please take the time to read it.

In this part, we will be exploring the Appserver architecture a bit more in depth. We will go through the concepts of the different contexts and the parts of Appserver you get out of the box, which cover some of the ground most of the popular PHP frameworks offer. We will also configure the web server and look into an application’s structure. Once we are finished, you should have a fair understanding about Appserver’s contexts in relation to threading, the web server, and its setup.

In subsequent parts, we’ll continue to go over the servlet engine in more detail, the persistence container, beans, the messaging system and the timer module. (Note: as this series evolved, the direction also changed, in order to include more practical information to break up the dry theory.)

The Contexts and Threading

As we had discussed in the first part, in today’s standard web server scenario, you will have a web server and either a web server module (mod_php) or a php process manager (PHP-FPM), to serve the PHP scripts/applications. The web server and the PHP process manager or module both handle their own work and threading to serve either the web page or the PHP application.

In this same respect, Appserver also handles threading for the client developer. However, the usage of the threads is somewhat different. The contents built within a thread aren’t constantly built and destroyed during the time appserver is running. In other words, as long as the appserver is running, the code you have given it to run, will continue to run (stay in memory) for each request. This fundamental difference is being repeated, as it is very important for understanding everything else we’ll be diving into.

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How to Create Custom View Controller Transitions and Animations

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