Welcome to part 4 of the Pong tutorial series. Please make sure you have read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Step Four: Program the Computer-controlled Paddle

OK, so the last tutorial was pretty short and sweet. So lets waste no time getting into the next step. This step is pretty important because we begin to look at a very important step in game programming: AI (which stands for Artificial Intelligence).

Artificial Intelligence

Any time when the computer itself needs to control something (like an enemy in a game) and perform certain actions depending on certain conditions, we call this AI. Now, our AI is fairly basic. We need the computer’s paddle to move up and down to try to block the ball from getting past. It would be easy to make the cpuPaddle ALWAYS block the ball — all we would do is constantly set the cpuPaddle.y to the ball.y position. But how do we give the computer the intelligence to act like a normal player, sometimes succeeding and other times failing?

Continue reading →

(This is part 3 of the Pong tutorial series. Please read Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t done so already.)

Step Three: Program the Player-controlled Paddle

We got the ball to move and bounce off of the walls in our last tutorial. Now it’s time to program the player-controlled paddle. What does the playerPaddle need to do?

• Set it’s y-position to the y-position of the mouse
• Stay within the boundaries of the screen
• Block the ball from passing through it

This will be a pretty simple tutorial section.

Continue reading →

Welcome to Part 2 of the Actionscript 3 Flash game tutorial series for Pong!

Make sure you check out Part 1 if you haven’t done that already. And if you are completely new to programming, my Getting Started tutorials are the place for you.

Enough talk, let’s code.

Step Two: Program the basic game loop and the ball

First things first, we need to name each instance of our game pieces — this is what we’ll use to refer to each object in the code. Name the paddle on the left “playerPaddle” (no quotes), the paddle on the right “cpuPaddle”, and the ball can just be named “ball”.

Continue reading →

In 1972 Atari pioneered the video game industry with the release of Pong. If you think of classic games, Pong is almost always near the top of the list. So it is fitting that Pong should be at least one of your first flash games you make. In this tutorial, we are going to create a complete Pong game from start to finish.

This is intended for beginners, but if you have never programmed at all before you should check out my Getting Started tutorial first.

This is what we are going to create over the next 6 tutorials:

Continue reading →