Pong for Amiga: How to write a video game in a day.



I consider Pong the “Hello World !” of video games. No matter what platform, it should be possible to write a simple game quickly and Pong is such a game. In this video I demonstrate how I made my version for the Commodore Amiga using techniques from my tutorial series “Amiga Hardware Programming in C”.

This is hopefully the beginning of a new series, “A Busy Parent’s Guide to Writing Lots of Video Games”, where I show how a busy parent with no time, no budget, but a lot of enthusiasm can still create video games by setting reasonable goals.

0:00 Introduction
0:58 The Assets
1:31 I am using Sprites for all the graphics objects
2:04 Using the keyboard for controlling the paddles
2:27 Asset preparation/integration
2:57 Source code: initialization
3:30 Source code: the copper list
3:47 Source code: end of initialization
3:52 Source code: data structures for the game objects
4:39 Source code: keyboard handler
5:01 Source code: main() function – the game logic
5:49 Source code: ball – paddle collision behavior implementation
6:50 It works !

The source code for this video can be found at

https://github.com/weiju/busyparentsguide_amiga

If you haven’t yet I encourage you to take a look at my tutorial series “Amiga Hardware Programming in C”, which I created with video game programming in mind.

The ratr0-utils mentioned are available at https://github.com/weiju/ratr0-utils
or you can install them with Python 3 pip:

$ pip install ratr0-utils

This video contains a small segment where I play a simple cover of the Chris Huelsbeck song “Carl Lewis Challenge Theme”. This is mainly because I just wanted to include an hommage to one of my biggest musical influences. Chris’s work on the Amiga is some of the best there is.

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