PONG dev log

I don't have any screenshots for this project, but whatever. I started to panic a little about how to do this, but as I went along, it turned out to be quite simple. I didn't really run into many issues, as most of them were caused by me and my bad coding (missing capitals, misspelled variables, etc.), which, of course, ChatGPT is a lifesaver for. But I did end up teaching myself how to read the debug log, as sometimes ChatGPT’s answers can be a little funky or outdated (it was adamant that "linearVelocity" should just be "velocity" in my code), or it would just add random bits of code for no major reason, which would then screw up my train of thought. It's a useful tool, but not something to completely rely on.

Some of the design choices I made, such as having the score in the "background," I thought were genius until I looked for how other people made their Pong games stand out online. It seems to be an already overdone trope, but I guess not every idea is original. I did end up cannibalizing some of the scripts from the Invaderoids tutorials, mainly the scene-switching stuff and the player win condition, which was quite helpful in giving me the starting blocks and slowly figuring out how to make it work in my game.

I did end up going down a rabbit hole trying to understand how the || operator works, as I came across it being used when setting the win conditions a lot online. Surprisingly, getting the builds to work was a lot more effort than I thought. I had to download the ability to make WebGL builds, then Unity wouldn't open again, and WebGL builds take about 30 years to finalize. Once I finally got it all sorted and gave it a try, I forgot I changed the ball's starting speed to be way too high, so I had to rebuild it again. But as of writing this, I haven't tested it yet, as my mates downstairs are waiting for me so we can play DnD, so I guess I'll find out if it's broken later. I know that the normal ZIP version works fine with the original speed of the ball, but anyway, I think this covers what I did and some of the struggles I had when making this game.