Professional XNA™ Programming: Building Games for Xbox 360™ and Windows® with XNA Game Studio 2.0, Second Edition

Chapter 2. Creating Your First Game: Pong

This chapter provides information on designing and creating a simple Pong game. Pong was the first video game ever and even before the first Pong versions in the sixties there was a version that could be played on an oscilloscope (Tennis for Two, 1958, by William A. Higinbotham). This shows how easy it is to implement a very basic version of Pong. A TV engineer named Ralph Baer claims that he had the idea of implementing Pong even before that in 1951, but not until 1966 was he able to produce the first prototypes. Atari licensed Pong in the eighties and even fought a court case with another company claiming it was the first to invent Pong. If you think about it today the fight sounds really crazy for such a simple game. You can read the whole Pong story at www.pong-story.com.

Implementing a very simple Pong clone doesn't take much time, but you will also learn about the sprite classes of XNA in this chapter. You start by writing the concept of your game and go through the full design phase of game projects. In future projects, you already know the process of writing a concept first, then create the first unit tests with help of the concept and finally go to the implementation process through each of the unit tests. Then you learn about an effective way to organize and use textures for your games. Additionally you will fine-tune the game, make it more fun, add two-player support, and even test it on the Xbox 360 console.

Although this chapter ...