Pung: A Roguelite

My First Game!

Hey everyone! This is Pung: A Roguelite, the first game I've actually finished in my journey to learn game development. I've always wanted to make games, it's what got me into programming but I never knew where to start or always started too ambitious. I kept seeing and hearing "make simple games" so I decided to begin with the classics and put my own spin on them.

The first game I remade was Pong, and I added an extra mode to make it more my own

I wanted something simple enough I could implement it without being too ambitious or too boring. I went with a roguelite where every time you survive a "floor", you have to choose between 3 modifiers (therefore random difficulty progression) and see how long you can keep the ball in play. Now you're dealing with:

• Drunk balls that wobble unpredictably
• Invisible balls that vanish randomly
• Reverse controls that mess with your muscle memory
• Multiple balls (this one is really hard, don't choose it)
• Tiny paddles, giant paddles, slow paddles, fast paddles, you get the idea...

The further you go, the harder it gets

Each floor increases the base difficulty while throwing new persistent modifiers into the mix.

You control both paddles (because it's a survival game, not versus), and your goal is simple: don't let the ball hit the walls. Easier said than done when the ball is drunk, invisible, and there are suddenly two of them.

Built with Unity

Starting blind basically knowing nothing more than what I remembered from a couple of Brackeys tutorials was a huge learning experience. Looking up things in the documentation, forums and youtube videos, relying as little as possible on AI to really learn through the process, I felt like I learnt a lot for a beginner. I learned about particle systems, UI, audio management, and some interesting game dev architectures like instances and singleton patterns... (Although I'm still not 100% sure about a lot of the best practices, even for simple things like game object referencing)

I was going for that classic arcade cabinet feel with the curved screen borders. It's not the prettiest game ever, but it's mine, and I'm honestly pretty proud of how it turned out.

A word or warning ⚠️

You will most probably encounter bugs or weird physics interactions, I didn't focus too much on ironing them out. Same with balancing, it wasn't my priority so the roguelike mode might be too easy or too hard, I'm not sure.

---

Thanks for checking out my first completed game! If you have any feedback or just want to share your highest floor reached, I'd love to hear from you. I probably won't continue development on this game other than some clean up as my main goal was to have a completed game from menu screen to a complete game loop. I'm eager to carry on to new projects and learn from my next games, but I might come back this eventually. Here's to many more games in the future! 🚀

Controls: W/S for left paddle, Up/Down arrows for right paddle.