Funky Pong

This is the first entry of my game a week challenge. A pong-like game in which you just have to keep punching the ball in order to increase your score. You can paint walls with different colors, but don't forget to make the ball explode in order to validate your score! ;) Here's a post-mortem:

Idea
For my first week, I decided to start small and revisit a video game classic : Pong. I had no real direction in my head for this, but all I knew was that I wanted this to be a fast-paced game, unlike the original Pong.

What went well
I’m pleased with the result of this week’s challenge. I’m not an artist. I don’t know how to draw. And when I started this week, I didn’t think that my first game would look so polished. Coding a game in a week is fun. I also really like the fact that I will be able to put a new project in my protfolio on each Sunday. However, I can see that there will be some weeks during which it will be pretty hard for me to polish the result.

What went wrong
Game design was a bit hard because I had to make something that was fun enough and feasible in a single week. This is why I didn’t have the time to implement all of the features I wanted to in the beginning. For example, I wanted to add enemies, like bosses with patterns that could be killed only when hitted by the ball with the correct color. I hope that Funky Pong is still fun without this feature :)

What I learned
DON’T RUSH THINGS ! My first reflex when starting this week was to begin prototyping a lot of things that had no sense in terms of game design. As a result, the first day my prototype ended up having features that were not even close to being fun. This is why I decided to restart the challenge and make this game one step at a time by making a little Game Design Document before diving into the coding part.