Chapter 4. Designing a two-player ball-and-paddle game
A fight breaks out over breakfast, and there is only one way to settle it: bounce a fried egg between two cast-iron skillets without letting it hit the wall. This two-player game ends when one person reaches seven points by making their opponent miss the egg. Breakfast Wars is a remake of the first ball-and-paddle game, Pong, though it replaces Pong’s white line paddle with a pan and its LED light with an egg, as seen in figure 4.1.
Figure 4.1. A game of Breakfast Wars means making a purple backdrop, a fried egg, two skillets, and two lines to serve as walls.
Breakfast Wars is all the fun of table tennis without leaving your living room.
A unique game calls for unique sprites, and making them means learning some core art concepts. In this chapter, you will learn
- How the color wheel breaks down into primary, secondary, and tertiary colors
- How to balance color between backgrounds and sprites
- How to make color choices work together in your game
Let’s start by making a simple, purple background.
Backgrounds usually set the scene, giving the player information about the type of game they’re about to play. A game set in space may have a black background with little white dots for stars, whereas a game set on a farm is going to have pixelated green meadows. Breakfast Wars has a solid purple background to keep the player’s focus solely on the fried egg.