Scratching off a goal

What if Pong were combined with a stock chart?

Let’s begin by me telling you about my goal setting. You see, there’s a bingo sheet. I assembled it when I realized I needed a way to show the audience, and my friends, the weird ideas I had in mind for the channel.

I find a bingo sheet is useful. Here’s how. I use that to aim for certain ideas to help orientate the channel. For example, one of the channel goals is to oneday appear in a theater. However, there are certain other listed items that are set by YouTube. Other goals I set for myself. I’ve noticed this trend that goals that I can control? I scratch those off.

And in today’s article, I’m going to talk a bit about the next one I’m scratching off of this big, giant list of audacious ideas.

History is more than beeps.

The history of video games goes back a long way. It occured to me that with today’s technology that I could probably recreate, in a kind of unique way, older video games and learn about some of the weird problems that go along with the game design. I needed to start somewhere. And so what better place than the game Pong.

Pong was initially released in 1972. However, it was based on electronic games going back into the early 1960s. When I say that video games go back a long way, that’s what I mean. Trace the trendlines and you’ll find a historical context that goes back quite a bit further than you might imagine.

This article isn’t about sharing the deep history of Pong. You can go read about that on Wikipedia by people with a real talent for writing these sorts of things. It’s available here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong

Show me the now

Unlike the prior game releases, this release has two ways to find it.

• Available on the unusualdd.com website at https://unusualdd.com/games/shakepong/
• Available on the itch.io website also here https://unusualdd.itch.io/shakepong

This game is not meant to be played on a mobile device. In fact, it really isn’t all that playable, we could gamble on whether it’s fun, or if this title is much more than a curiosity. However, the software does have all the core mechanics of a “game”. There are players, rules and a score. It’s available online and I’m done with it, well, I think I’m done with it. You’ll have to tell me if I should go back to this title and update it in some meaningful or consequential way.

How long did this take to make?

I’ve started timeboxing my activities. The all-in time for creating this game, plus the time I’m investing in updating the itch site as well as this medium article is a bit north of 8 hours. I boxed in 8 hours, but it’s a nice evening and I’m having a bit of fun writing this so I figure it’s fine just to kind of go on about little things related to the project on the off-chance I ever come back and read this post again in the future.

What worked really well for keeping the entire game development life cycle down to the eight hour box is having a clear game model to work with. The entire idea I had conceived up earlier in the week. “What if there is a game like Pong, but somehow makes use of a stock chart?” Incidentally, the Milkshake character appears in the channel. If you go back and watch the video on the origins of the golden cross “go-go golden cross”, the opening frames have a little sprite follow the stock chart and the zoom out to the moon. That idea is one I combined with the game Pong.

Long-time channel fans will note that I brought in various characters and even static assets that I have pop up in the channel from time to time. It’s no secret, or it certainly won’t be now, that I take every conceptual time-saving shortcut I can to achieve a two-video a week schedule and have time to write things like this article, build games, oh and all the things that I do when I’m not working on the channel. My personality demands I keep pretty busy, and I’ve made peace with it.

How did you make this??

Well, I opened Unity3D up and just kinda started. My first puzzle was figuring out what to do with this sprite. If you caught one of my earlier Medium articles, I covered how to do sprite art in Photoshop. This is my first sprite art asset. I figure for my first one it does the most important thing: it gets the job done.

From there, it was just a matter of putting in the stock candles as paddles. The funny thing about the stock chart that builds is that the reason why the milkshake-ball bounces off those is because each of these? That’s right. Each one is itself a paddle that’s just fixed in position.

The candles look pretty realistic, given the overall state of the game. I found it a bit mesmerizing to watch the game play. It was almost as if I recognized some of the charts. Perhaps all stock chart activity can really be understood by some hidden variables of two players playing Pong, which that I think about how capital flows in the market? That’s not far from the truth.

Deep thoughts aside, there is a bit of a trick I figured out which is to just resize the candle based on the distance of the paddle when it was time to take a candle snapshot. If you’re wondering about the ticker interval, it’s set to every 5 seconds. Why 5 seconds? Well, IBKR has a 5 second bar delay somewhere in all that mess of a website and so I figure if it’s good enough for them, then it’ll surely be fine for an experimental version of the game Pong that features a stockchart and spinning Milkshake.

Example of Stock chart that forms from playing the game.

But wait, there’s more. When I was testing the game I realized it was a lot of fun to just let Player 1 and Player 2 both play the game out at each other. You know what’s really interesting is the little “think delay” that occurs between each player. This is due to a little entropy that’s in the system. I had considered making that something as a Player you could configure because there are certainly settings for the entropy that make the game either easier or harder, but I cut that feature as being not-really-relevant to shipping the title. If there’s some strange upsurge of interest into this game, I’ll revisit it. Otherwise, I just intend to use this project as a teachable lesson for me.

Example of a bullish climb

What was learned

One of the big motivations behind building the game is motivated squarely in making the animation pipeline for the channel even better. My theory is that games have a kind of natural synergy that may allow me to further hone the craft of making animation and art for the channel proper. So what skills or art did I learn from this one?

This project generated a really neat idea for a new character for the channel. A kind of cartoony candle stick, which the idea is clear in my head but I know I don’t yet have the artistic skills to execute on that idea. Ideas aside, there are real assets that have already found their way into a video. Building out sprites for games, it turns out, helps me add embellishments to videos. Little details here and there, and I have no doubt I’ll be making use of these candle stick sprites down the road.

Even better is that I’ll be able to record game footage pretty soon and then use that for some interesting and relevant B-roll down the road. So that’ll be quite useful as well. Would I do this again? I would, but that’s a bit bigger topic than I should cover in this section. Let’s visit that next.

Would I do it again?

I would. If I were to summarize the keys that really made this little project come together so cleanly, it’d be this.

• Timebox of no more than 8 hours for the project.
• A strange open block of time on a Saturday morning, even after finishing all the script research for the Monday episode.
• Having an existing stock of art assets and quirky things to pull in to quickly make out the project.

In a weird way, the longer I do the work of running a channel and pushing myself in these little side projects… the further I’m able to take all of it. Where’s it all going? Well, that’s what that bingo sheet way up at the top of this rather long article is talking about.

What needs improved from my perspective?

The next time around I start considering a game project, I need to get a jump on using itch and the gamedev journal there to chronicle the process. An eight hour project is a bit too short to justify writing a series of articles around it. It can take me up to an hour to even get out one article as is, and that assumes I go back and do some level of edit or curation around the content.

There’s quite clearly a lot of technical things that would be nice to have figured out. I am keenly aware this sort of thing doesn’t work on mobile (I tried), but I also couldn’t quite figure out a way to package up the game as a downloadable executable file that could be shared with the six people around the world most likely to play the game. That being said, I don’t know if itch.io is truly a lucrative path to financing my broader and bigger vision around the channel. Perhaps it is, or perhaps it’s just a useful distraction that helps improve my skills and stock of art assets that enrich the videos that inevitably then show up on the channel twice a week.

I just realized I assume you know about the channel. Have you been to Unusual Due Diligence on YouTube? It’s here: https://www.youtube.com/c/UnusualDueDiligence

One other bit that I just did not have time to get into the game was the ANKR SDK. That was one of my big goals for the game, but taking up eight hours to do this title was take all in getting the art assets in place and the core game mechanic. Plus, it has been a while since I’ve looked at that ANKR SDK for Unity3D. So I’m sure there’s a few hours of learning there that would need to be done. I will say that can be one of the most challenging aspects of working with all these tools. They change as often as I use them.

Game Play Strategies & Weird Glitches

This is one of the fun sections of this article. There’s some really interesting game play strategies and glitches I noticed with the game. The game does not have a win condition programmed into the title. The game concludes after 99 seconds and the player with the highest score is either the human or the AI. I had intention to put in a “you win!” screen, but eight hours is eight hours. I also needed to grab a bite to eat in there, too.

That being said, let’s talk about those game strategies. Here’s a list of observations around the game, different play strategies and notes that I found interesting. So if for some weird reason you are googling “ShakePong tips” or “ShakePong gameplay strategies”, then here you go.

• It can be useful to deliberately build out the stock wall, and then place the paddle/candle in such a way that the opponent is forced to play against the pattern. The bounces speed up with each bounce and after a time there’s a good chance that the ball? It’ll just bounce right thru the paddle.
• There is a weird state where Milkshake will get stuck in a rotating circle. This is despite my best effort at ensuring there’s always some amount of physics applied to the Milkshake to keep it moving about the field. There’s three options when this happens. First, you can just let the clock run out. Second, you can hit ‘escape’ and go back to the menu. Third, you can see if you can’t get the chart pattern to build so close to Milkshake it causes the Shake to eject at rocketship velocity.
• If you’re taking over for the green paddle (that’s the ‘h’ key in the game), you might notice the paddle moves pretty slow until it starts building up speed. The trick here is to always have the up or down arrow key held down, this causes both the paddle to move faster, but it also elongates the paddle.
• I believe the theoretical maximum score in this game is around 30 points and that’s based on a so-called perfect play. The red bar always gets the first chance at responding to the Milkshake. However, after that it’s anyone’s guess.
• The Milkshake bounces off the stock patterns, this can create some really interesting bounce scenarios. The bounce rule in effect states that after four bounces off the top or bottom borders, the Milkshake is taken by the referee and reset in the center stage. However, there is no limit to the number of bounces off any of the candles. It can bounce off those all day long.

I didn’t really expect there to be game strategies on such a quick little title, but after watching the game play out for a while I have to say there certainly are little techniques available that make the game kind of interesting to try and optimize towards.

Scratching off that goal

If you visit the goals list for the channel, you’ll find the “launch a second web game” to be checked off as of me publishing this article. It feels pretty good. What the future yet holds remains mysterious, but I do know this.

This is Unusual Due Diligence. I am your host, Poseidon, god of the sea and whose spirit animates me the talking Milkshake. Make waves, my friends.

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