Ping Pong

Prompt 3: Describe an interesting moment of interplay.

In Ping Pong, the core verbs assigned to the sprites were to move up and down in order to create a collision with the ball traveling across the field of play, preventing a goal from being scored by the other player.  In terms of how the world itself changes as the player moves up and down, there really isn’t any change.  However, the most interesting aspect of the game is a sprite that isn’t controlled by either character: the ball’s movement speed.  The ball’s movement speed is relatively fast, which provides a shorter reaction window for the defending player to position their paddle correctly in order to prevent a goal.  And, even if a goal is prevented, the player is possibly still in danger because of their exposed positioning.  For example, say the ball is heading towards Player A, and in order to prevent a goal, Player A must move their paddle all the way to the top of the play area.  The ball flies away in the other direction, where the ball is now in Player B’s court.  If Player A doesn’t reposition themselves towards the center of the play area while Player B is trying to prevent a goal, then the bottom of the play area is completely exposed in the case of a return shot, since Player A won’t have enough time to get from the top to the bottom of the play area before the ball crosses the goal plane.  If the player wishes to anticipate the next shot on goal, then they must be in the correct position in order to give themselves a proper reaction window.

Prompt 3: Describe an interesting moment of interplay.

Since this is a two player-game, I asked my roommates to play this game with me. There are many interesting moments. The core verb of this game is to move the wall up and down so that it can hit back the ping pong ball back. And the person who misses it will lose. First both of us were really bad at controlling how the wall moves. It is a bit less friendly for players who use the arrow keys to control the wall movement, because we were both more accustomed to using the up and down keys to control the walls instead of the left and right arrow keys. So when we switched the sides, whoever that uses the arrow keys always lost. But then after a few rounds, we were getting more and more familiar with it. And there is a case where both of us just stopped move the wall around and the ball can still keep bounce back and forth and nobody can win or lose until I move the wall a bit so that the ball can be hit back in a slightly different angle. Moreover, the ball will shoot immediately once someone did not catch the ball and it will shoot from the middle to the other player. It was really hard for us to catch that at first, and I actually still cannot catch that accurately in the later part of the game, so I lost many rounds. However, my roommate reacted quite good to it and he can catch that ball every time.