Poing, the obvious remix

Most people, when thinking of revolutionary game ideas, try to make their game nothing like the games before. We took a "Think Inside The Box" approach.

The box

The first game ever developed was Pong in Nov 29, 1972. The game was nothing in terms of graphics, controls and even user interface. Fast forward to 2021 we now have all the technology to make this old fashioned game one of the leading multiplayer one

The plan

One task: create a modern pong game, with no compromises

We saw potential in this pong game; we are sure that with the new technology we have, the pong game can be fun to play just as other modern games

So, we obviously had to glue together multiple aspects. Here are all the libraries/core elements we had to implement

pymunk

An actual physics engine that can handle better edge cases than traditional ones. It also allows customization of collisions which allows us to create conditional physics. Compared to the silly 1 dimensional space in Pong, this new engine will allow a new experience to a low resolution physics sim

pygame

An excellent framework to allow debugging of the physics engine, and a surprisingly? great tool for creating the sound engine.

curses

The core and backbone of our application. Every module in our project is written with the final implementation to a core curses library in mind. This flexible and low level api allowed us to create our own update schemes

keyboard

curses was extremely limited in terms of keyboard, and of course, we couldn't allow such compromises. A pyinput.keyboard module would perfectly suit our needs of checking if a key is up or down. To integrate this with our new curses UI framework, we developed a cascading event passing structure

event handlers

Even if pynput.keyboard works nice on its own, its hard to manage which button is actually listening to an event. So, we changed the structure to a recursive stacking call structure (imagine a waterfall) to allow easier debugging and structural organization.

websockets

What is a fighting game without multiplayer support? NOTHING! websockets allows the communication between players to virtually interact with each other.

server verification

But how can we ensure that only verified people can join the game? Well, by introducing server verfication of course. By passing a token on connecting to the server, we can identify the person who logged in. This way, banning that player would be an easy trick as well.

django

The best way to verify people in a code jam from a discord server is, without a doubt, a discord oauth application. The django website is actually a bridge between our oauth application. Once someone is verified, the website shows a button so you can copy your token

pygame.mixer

The pong game had a reminiscent ping, pong sound. We wanted to deliver this sensation to our players. Introducing pygame.mixer, a module that can support the playback of multiple sounds, perfect for multi-event concurring online play

json

json based messaging system provided us with an easy way to debug our code. Using postman to script and send verification code and game packet code allowed easier testing than using small python scripts. It was also easy to read, as print(payload) would just print the dictionary to the console. Double win for us. We might have used python's pickle, but we found out that using json was better for short term development

application state manager

Our ui system is actuallly multiple screens attached. Each ui handles its own inputs and events. So what is a good way to check if these ui states work correctly? An application state manager. By structuring our app to have a while True loop with multiple ui's being awaited to return a new app state, developing a ui has never been more easier

ui pipeline

The ui system is layered like an onion. A single keypress to change the ui screen goes through Keyboard -> App -> UI -> Widget just to be processed. This organization structure might be daunting to visualize. This is why we developed a ui pipeline that shows all of this

data pipelines

The game data can go in all places. It is important to know whether a module is above or below another. Sometimes, two modules have to coexist. This is why a nice data pipeline diagram can help our developers make modules.

The execution

The execution is documented in devlog/README.md

Ending remarks

Although we planned various elements ahead, we ran out of time. The end product is not even near its full potential.

We doubt that we will win this jam but if we ever get to do another,

We know that our team has created and developed one of the most ambitious projects in programming history

pymunk, pygame, curses, advanced keyboard io stacks, event handlers, websockets, server verification and validation, django, sounds, json, application state manager, ui/data pipelines etc all in 7 days

Honestly, we do think that we overestimated our team's capabilities, but we are sure that once we pushed these limits, its gonna be much easier to reach them later

A lot of the ui code and game engine elements have common themes that are exhibit in a lot of code that we will see later in our development journey

Learning these structures can help us determine the next "logic" to achieve something.

We hope that this jam taught us lessons.

Every member was glad to have others as their 'team'

Video showcase

YouTube - created by nobalpha

(Since the physics engine has a bug, it is really hard to capture a ball bounce)

Developers

nopeless - Team leader
Lobbying system, websockets configuration, authentication, real-time server game engine construction, network manager, engine simulation to terminal rendering, player based camera, level & entity management

Nickhil - Team member
Full stack creation of a web page, backend authentication, django management

MePhew - Team member
Sound engine integration, main menu and credits page, discord rich presence

Karthik_Mv - Team member
UI population, main menu, host a game and lobby page creation

nobalpha - Team member
Early game engine prototyping, primitive simulation to terminal render engine, simple randomized map generation, custom map configuration, entity management, authentication + db design, small game logic and physics contributions

madara uchiha - Team member
Visual designer, logo creation, website and game frontend designer