Here is my submission for the challenge.

Sadly I don't have the time to work on it again before the end of the month, and the AI is stupid to say the least.
The twist is pretty straightforward, the arena is round instead of rectangular.

When a player hits the ball it changes its color. When the ball is red if it exit the arena the point will go to the red paddle. Viceversa when it's blue the point will go to the blue paddle.
The two paddles can also overlap and both hit the ball. When this happens and the ball exit the arena a point will be subtracted to both player.

Here's the blog post:

I hope you like it

Code reviews are really appreciated!

Round Pong.zip

Solution.zip

Hi again! I think I've finished the game. In the end, I avoided randomizing the ball angles to make the game more predictable (and tactical), but I did implement a new AI (which makes playing alone super-cool now!). If you tried the game but got bored because of the easy AI, feel free to try again! You can get the game in this page, and check out the source code here.

I'll let you know when I finish the post-mortem. Regards!

Please find the game's post-mortem here: https://racso.itch.io/power-word-pong/devlog/16651/post-mortem

But Pong is too easy... why not something like Contra. [Offensive language removed by moderator]

12 minutes ago, francoisdiy said:

why not something like Contra

The challenges are intended to be approachable for beginner to intermediate developers who may struggle to make such a game in the timeframe.

On 27/11/2017 at 2:53 PM, reders said:

Here is my submission for the challenge.

Nice!

I have a comment: the game is too fast in my computer. I don't know if you designed it that way, or if it's running faster in my computer than in yours because the game is framerate-dependent. In case you don't know the term: it means that if the game runs at a higher framerate in my computer because my computer has better hardware, then everything will move faster, too (because, for example, you move the paddle "one unit per frame", so if there are more frames per seconds, it'll move more units per second). I couldn't find a good tutorial or explanation on the topic, sadly. The closest I found was this: https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/67/delta-time-and-framerate-independence.

If you actually wanted your game to be blazing fast, then ignore everything I just said!

10 hours ago, racsoth said:

Nice!

I have a comment: the game is too fast in my computer. I don't know if you designed it that way, or if it's running faster in my computer than in yours because the game is framerate-dependent. In case you don't know the term: it means that if the game runs at a higher framerate in my computer because my computer has better hardware, then everything will move faster, too (because, for example, you move the paddle "one unit per frame", so if there are more frames per seconds, it'll move more units per second). I couldn't find a good tutorial or explanation on the topic, sadly. The closest I found was this: https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/67/delta-time-and-framerate-independence.

If you actually wanted your game to be blazing fast, then ignore everything I just said!

Ops. My mistake.

SFML has a frame rate limiter pretty unstable so I simply activated the VSync to avoid getting crazy with clocks. I wasn't thinking about monitor with higher refresh rate than 60 FPS.

I'll fix it as soon as I have time

Thank you for pointing that out to me

@racsoth Sorry, installerphobia. Good Game. This is actually bad ass for a pong. Has a feeling of real time strategy. 

@frob neat. no VR device so I got presented with three game objects positioned at right angles from each other, a help frame and no game play.

@reders cool concept. ball moves at light speed so I'm assuming you don't take frame time into account but I see you're already aware. (I'm on a 60 hrz monitor)

13 minutes ago, GoliathForge said:

@racsoth Sorry, installerphobia. 

Hi. My game doesn't use a installer (it's a standalone exe), so I don't understand what do you mean.

ah. it was some warning dialog from unknown publisher thing. Very good. this was the first challenge game that actually worked without problems out of the box for me. I'm going back a play some more...

On 23/12/2017 at 10:30 AM, GoliathForge said:

ah. it was some warning dialog from unknown publisher thing. Very good. this was the first challenge game that actually worked without problems out of the box for me. I'm going back a play some more...

Yeah, those dialogs are terribly confusing. Microsoft does some serious harm to independent developers with that kind of things.

I'm glad you liked the game