Okay, so yesterday I decided to dive into making a simple volleyball game, I named it “boom boom volleyball game”. It was more of a spur-of-the-moment thing, really. I’ve been messing around with game development as a hobby, and I figured, why not try something new?
I started by sketching out some basic ideas. Nothing fancy, just stick figures on a piece of paper, outlining how I wanted the game to look and feel. I wanted it to be super simple, two players, one on each side of the net, and a ball bouncing back and forth.
Getting Started with the Basics
First things first, I needed a game engine. after looked around, I fired that up and created a new project. I started with a blank canvas, literally. I added a simple rectangle for the ground, another one for the net, and two more for the players. They were just colored blocks at this point, but it was a start!
Next up, the ball. I made a circle and gave it some basic physics. I wanted it to bounce realistically, so I played around with the gravity and bounciness settings until it felt right. It took a bit of tweaking, getting the ball to bounce just high enough and not fly off the screen.
Adding Player Movement
Then came the player controls. I wanted the players to move left and right. I wrote some simple code that listened for keyboard input. Press the left arrow key, player one moves left. Right arrow key, player one moves right. Same thing for player two, but using the ‘A’ and ‘D’ keys. It was surprisingly simple to get the players moving around.
Making the Ball Interactive
Now for the fun part: making the players hit the ball! I added some collision detection. Basically, I told the game to check if the ball was touching a player. If it was, I wanted the ball to bounce back. This took a bit more fiddling. I had to make sure the ball bounced in the right direction depending on where it hit the player. A hit on the left side of the player should send the ball to the right, and vice-versa.
Scoring Some Points
Of course, a game needs a way to score! I added a simple scoring system. Whenever the ball hit the ground on one side, the other player got a point. I displayed the score at the top of the screen, just plain text, nothing fancy. I wanted to keep it simple, remember?
Iterating and Improving
After that i tried and tried again, to fix bugs, I spent a good chunk of time just playing the game myself, trying to break it. I found a few bugs, like the ball sometimes getting stuck or the players moving too fast. I went back to the code and fixed those issues. It was a process of trial and error, really.
Wrapping Up (For Now!)
By the end of the day, I had a working, albeit very basic, volleyball game. It wasn’t pretty, but it was playable! The players could move, hit the ball, and score points. It was a great learning experience, and I was pretty proud of what I’d accomplished in just a few hours.
It’s far from finished, of course. I have tons of ideas for improvements: better graphics, sound effects, maybe even some power-ups! But for now, it’s a solid start. I think I’ll call it a day and come back to it later. Game development is a marathon, not a sprint, right?
