FLUDONG – Po(ng)etry in Motion
There’s a few buggy bits, I somehow got it crashing when you try to do smooth scaling, the code became a beast and I have no idea how well it’ll run on other computers. Many more tweaks that could be made, but it’s done enough to throw it out there. It’s pong with fluid dynamics, kind of like plasmapong in that I used the same paper for the fluid dynamics code, however I tried to actually make the game side more pong-like and fun to play (I always found that plasmapong was beautiful to look at, but the game wasn’t exactly ‘fun’).
I did find out pretty quickly that even at low res, it’s probably not the best idea to do fluid dynamic simulation in a scripting language. Luckily the LuaJIT version of the engine that sfernald posted in this comment (you can download a bare version here, minus the example game) actually did provide a huge speedup and made it playable on my compy.
You can download the actual game code here, just throw the files in the same folder as the LuaJIT executable and run that. More tasty pixel fluid dynamics after the jump.
(EDIT: replaced rar after fixing a small problem, where it told you you lost when you won, and added 2 more palettes. On a side note, sometimes when running it goes very slow for me, in which case if I close and start again it’ll normally be fine)
P.S. SEKRIT CODE!
Wow this is pretty cool. It’s like a retro version of plasma pong.
I played a couple of games and it didn’t slow down on me.
Pretty nifty. Though I thought it froze up when I scored, it turns out I just needed to press ‘start’ again.
Yeah, I wanted to show a frozen frame of how the field looked after a point was scored, but really couldn’t be bothered writing another message with drawRect’s. Might have been better to have a ‘press start’ message there to reset it, then to have the game start moving when you pressed any key.
I had the same reaction, thedaian. The fluid effect looks great! I felt compelled to keep playing until I won, and apparently I’m terrible at pong, so that took a while…
Yeah, when I’ve had a bit of time to kill I’ve actually found myself going back to play a game or two. Don’t remember ever making a game before that I’ve wanted to go back and play
Awesome! A 48h Plasmapong. It’s true that the low resolution was a good context for heavy field dynamics. And as the others said, it is actually fun to play.
Great work!