This is an implementation of the classic game Pong using C.
It was originally written as a solution to Gustavo Pezzi's Create A Game Loop Using C and SDL Udemy course and here.
After a few commits, it's not as bare bones as it once was. I wanted to try a few things like Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero input flow in this context.
If it helps someone else tinkering in SDL then great, if not, have fun!
I've set this up so that it can be played by two people on the one keyboard.
ESC- Will close the gamespacebar- Will start your game from the title screenF1- Will reset the game to the title screen at any timew- Moves the left paddle ups- Moves the left paddle downup- Moves the right paddle updown- Moves the right paddle down
The winner is the first to score 10 points because double digits is extremely taxing on modern hardware.
Check out the Releases tab and just download whatever is latest.
I highly doubt there's going to be many people looking at this so I'll just stick up the Windows builds.
I built this with SDL2 on Windows using the MVSC compiler and Visual Studio.
Gustavo has a good video on that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmGBhM8AEj8
I don't see any reason why compiling and linking with gcc wouldn't work if you've got SDL2 on your distro.
Instructions on how to set that up here:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfZ6WrV5Z7Y&t=562s (Linux)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfZ6WrV5Z7Y&t=693s (Mac)
- https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL2/Installation
This'll probably work if you've set things up properly on Linux/Mac:
gcc src/main.c "sdl2-config --cflags --libs" -o pong
If you use WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) then the Linux install steps should work for you too.
NOTE: You might need to tweak the paths to the image if you're not using Visual Studio or its executable directory is configured differently. I'll tweak the code if it's really an issue.
What little graphical assets there is are under the assets directory.
The GIMP .xcf files are in there too, if you want to tweak the source.
I knew movement vectors were the secret sauce for ball movement but wasn't sure how to implement it cleanly.
flightcrank was kind enough to share their code on github which helped me. Give them a star.
Also special thanks to:
- Gustavo Pezzi who got a backend dev like me into fun game dev stuff a few years ago with his great build a game for the Atari VCS series on Udemy.
- Casey Muratori whose Handmade Hero tutorial series has proved fun and invaluable. SDL's API is pretty simple but building an engine along with Casey made it all feel familiar and something I actually understood. I adapted his input flow pattern here for Pong.
Both these guys are worth your time, effort and money.