klipperkyle/wmpong

A Window Maker themed Pong clone

WMPong

Author: Kyle Terrien <kyleterrien at gmail dot com>

WMPong (short for Window Maker Pong) is a Pong clone that uses Window Maker tiles as the ball and an elongated Window Maker tile for the paddles.

The goal is to emulate a Window Maker look and feel and provide some sense of novelty as application icons bounce across the screen.

Window Maker is a window manager that attempts to emulate the look and feel of the NeXTStep system of the early 90s.

• Window Maker screenshot
• WMPong screenshot

This was a game I wrote for Computer Science 386 (Intro to Game Design). I am publishing it so others can enjoy it.

Installing/running

You will need Pygame installed on Python 3. I have tested this game on Arch Linux with Pygame compiled from their source control system.

• Pygame
• Pygame source control
• Arch Linux PKGBUILD for Pygame
• Another PKGBUILD for Pygame

After setting up Pygame, simply run the game:

python3 wmpong.py

Playing

You will see a screen with two paddles that are shaped like enlongated tiles. The paddle on the left is controlled with W (for up) and S (for down). The paddle on the right is controlled with the arrow keys. (Also, K and J will move the paddle on the right, just like in vim.)

Take a moment to familiarize yourself with the controls.

Press <Space> to start the game. An application tile (ball) will appear in the middle of the screen. Move the paddles to bounce the application tile off of the paddles. The application tile will bounce off of the top and bottom walls.

Each time the tile is hit, it will speed up a little. The first paddle to let the application tile slide off of his side of the screen loses. Generally each game lasts about two minutes. Press <Space> again to play another game.

WMPong is intended to be played with two players (one for each paddle). However, it is possible to play a game against oneself. (This is how I tested it.) In either case, the rules are simple: the first paddle to miss the ball loses; the other paddle wins.

Press <Esc> at any time to quit the game.

Hacking

The res directory contains the following:

• paddle.png - The paddle
• tile.tiff - The background of a tile, taken from Window Maker
• apps-raw/ - A bunch of icons of (hopefully familiar) applications, taken from Window Maker's icon cache
• apps/ - The icons in apps-raw overlaid with tile.tiff
• sine440.wav, sine599.3.wav, saw110.wav - Simple tone sounds generated with Audacity long ago.

To add more application icons, drop them in res/apps-raw/. They must be 64x64 pixels or smaller. Then run the shell script: (You must have ImageMagick installed.)

sh make_apps.sh

You may freely delete the res/apps/ directory before running this command.

License

Except where noted, WMPong is released by Kyle Terrien under the GNU GPLv2.

The tile icon (tile.tiff) is from Window Maker, which is distributed under GNU GPLv2. paddle.png is an enlongated version of this image.

Application icons are property of their respective owners, distributed under Fair Use.

(If, for whatever reason, you do not wish your application icons to be distributed with WMPong, please contact the author. I am quite flexible. Also, if you wish to add/donate application icons, please contact the author.)

Known bugs

• Pygame crashes when loading certain XPMs (mitigated by converting sprites to PNG)
• The screen is not double buffered (I do not know of a way to double-buffer the screen in Pygame.)

Bibliography

• The chimp.py example script
• Window Maker
• py-pong