So I'm sure you're wondering what the hell Pong-Karuga is exactly. Well let me start with a little bit of back story.

Right now I'm at Full Sail (Down in Orlando) and I'm going to school for Video Game Programming of the C++ variety. For the past 6 months we've been learning the basics of programming as well as some of the simpler data structures and compression algorithms. So we've been stuck down work in the console window for a while now (we made Simon and Boggle which were pretty awesome for being console window games...) and now we're finally out of the boring old console window and into Win32 programming!

The first part of this month's classes were spent making TicTacToe and learning the basics of Win32 and all of its functions and now we're tasked with making Pong.

The base requirements are pretty simple:
- Make it work like Pong
- Have some AI
- Allow players to save their game

That's pretty much all there is to it, although it's broken up into more little sections than that. So, with such simple requirements we're obviously not going to just sit back and turn in a basic Pong, oh no. We're going to make it as bad ass as we possibly can. The best part is that it's encouraged to go beyond regular pong!

So for the past week I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with a good idea to have my Pong stand out from the others we were shown. Some of the examples had great ideas such as Planets that pass through the background affecting the gravity on the ball, or adding small blocks around the screen to bounce the ball off of. With so many good ideas being presented it's hard to differentiate from the others.

A couple of my buddies and I had been talking about what we'd like to do. We talked about adding powerups to make your paddle bigger or to have your opponent's disappear for a few seconds, but the more we talked the less I felt like mine would be unique. And then it hit me...



Ikaruga. The first time I played it was when it was released for XBLA and I've loved it. Sure it's kicked my ass, but that's not all that rare. I figure, using the idea behind the polarity in Ikaruga could make for an interesting game of Pong. So far I've come up with this:

- Players can only hit the ball back when they're the same polarity as the ball. When they do they gain a small amount of energy toward the charged shot.
- On the way across the field the ball will come in contact with enemies flying in from the top. These enemies will be the ones that affect the polarity of the ball, causing it to bounce off as they explode. Another though is that they could pull the ball in and then launch it in a random direction so it's not as predictable as bouncing straight back from where they came.
- If the player hits the ball as the opposite polarity he loses a life.
- If the ball makes it passed the player, the opposition gets energy for a charged shot.
- The charged shot will let you pull the ball in and launch it across the field (it'll go in a random direction and as a random polarity) much faster than the normal speed, destroying everything in it's path. If the ball hits behind the enemy they lose a life, if i hits them as the opposite polarity they lose a life, but if the opposition is able to hit it with the correct polarity they're energy will instantly fill and they'll get a chance to fire their own charged shot.
- First to kill the opposition (lose all 5 lives) wins the game.

I've got high hopes for it and now that the ideas have started to swirl I'm really hoping I can pull it off.

So DToiders I ask you, do you think it could hold water?