Let me use this thread to tell this somewhat related story of mine.
When I was still at university we had a C class and were doing it in a computer lab with partners (back then very few students could afford a laptop). I was always partnering up with the same friend. Since we were a bit bored with the class we started building our own pong in C.
Rendering was done in ASCII in the command line, with paddles being 3 pipes, the ball a capital 0 and the walls "#". We would spend some time at the beginning of the class building/improving it and at the end playing it. We used keys like "W" and "S" for the left player and "O" and "L" for the right player. Since the initial setup with rendering and "physics" of the game went quite fast, we thought about how to improve it and make it more fun.
What made it incredibly fun (at least for us) in the end, was the addition of bonus squares. So, between the two paddles, if the ball that you just touched hit a bonus square, it would activate an effect for you or for the game depending on the bonus. We had:
- "wall", would create a 3 squares wall at the location of the bonus
- "turn of the lights", would hide everything but the ball (even the paddles)
- "gun", would allow you to shoot and destroy walls and bonuses
- "bigger/smaller paddle", self explanatory
- "net", would temporarily put a net behind you preventing you from missing the ball
- and some more, like speed up the ball, add an extra ball, etc.
It's been my one and only experience building a game but I think it was the most fun I've had programming…
If anybody is up for re-building a pong with bonuses I'd be definitely up for that ;)
Back on the topic: love the implementation OP, pretty addictive. And, as can be read above, it brought back some nice memories.