Ball Bounce

Try to keep the ball bouncing.

Move the white paddle using the A and D keys. Move the purple paddle using the <- and -> keys.

You can play the game here: https://tlietz.github.io/Ball-Bounce-Client/index.html

Ball Bounce is a game created in Rust using the macroquad game engine. It is compiled to wasm so that it can be played in a browser. For now, it has only local multiplayer with 2 players and keyboard controls.

Code Architecture

The game is created with an ECS (entity component system) architecture.

The Player and Ball are entities, which are represented by structs.

Velocity, Position, and Control are components, which are also represented by structs. Entities can have any number of components depending on what characteristics they need. For example, the Ball entity does not have a Control component, but the Player entities do.

Systems are functions that control everything. All of the game logic complexity is contained within the systems. This makes it easy to know where in the code features should be implemented.

This also explains why ECS was chosen instead of OOP. With OOP, it would be more difficult to determine where features should be implemented because games have many features that require interaction between mutliple objects.

For example, suppose we want to implement a bounce() function that bounces a ball off our paddle.

In OOP, we would have to decide whether to add bounce() to the Ball or Player object. Does a ball bounce off the paddle, or does the paddle bounce the ball? This may be easy to manage with a simple game, but as it gets more complex, OOP would become exponentially harder to manage.

With ECS, a system takes in the game_state and determines when to call bounce(). The system is external to both the Ball and the Player, so we no longer have to worry about where to put methods that handle interaction between multiple objects, like we would with OOP.

Future Work

• Make a GameState enum to replace the currently used BallState. This will allow adding states like Pause, and Menu.
• Create a game_state_system that handles changing the GameState enum. For example, pressing the p button for pause, and pressing q to quit.