Design Specs - Knowledge Review 8

One important aspect of design and programming (development as a whole), game-oriented or not, is having your design-specs defined early on in the project and use the specs as a production-guide. If you want to suddenly make something, you need to see if it fits [support] your design-specs. If not you either drop the idea or implement it after the first version of your project is completed.

This allows for the development to remain focused and productive. If the team keeps straying on other details that are not part of the plan, the production will take a lot more time than needed, or more time than allowed.

I do think it's important for one to learn what are design specs—what they include, what they look like, how they work. That's why I'm going to show you the design-specs of Knowledge Review 8.These are not the requirements of the knowledge review. Just the design-specs.

• Goal: Pong-like game
• Must remain simple (no need for title screen, menus, etc.)
• Ball needs to launch in a random direction from the center, either right or left; But not straight up or down (obvious bug warning)
• Player controls paddles
• Bounces off top/bottom walls
• Bounces off paddles
• A part of the paddle-motion (angle and speed) carried to the ball
• If player misses, other player (winning player) gets a point and ball re-launches towards winning player (still at a random angle)
• Both player are human-controlled

These should be familiar to anyone familiar with Pong. Keeping to those basic elements in mind will keep me focused on the important details. I already have some elements I want to add, but they will be done after.