My Experience Making Ping

29 Mar 2019

For my group’s project, we decided to make a clone of pong we called “Ping”. It wasn’t my first time working on a coding assignment as a group, but it certainly was my most enjoyable. Previous experiences working in groups often left me frustrated due to the lack of foresight and communication, and feeling like I was carrying the team due to having to rework their code very often. This was not the case when creating Ping. We communicated early, getting a great sense of what parts of the code we would need and how it would interact. We then proceeded to all procrastinate on the game for far longer than we should have, which taught us all the importance of time management. However, in the last few days before it was due, we all came together, sat down, and we would work on it as a group for hours at a time until we got it to a state we were happy with.
My contributions to the code were the Ball framework, the ball’s launch() method, as well as several tweaks to the equations we used elsewhere. The experience of all of us getting together and just working on it until it was done was very fun, and also incredibly satisfying. I was honestly really scared about not finishing in time, but we succeeded, and when we launched the game and had it working, there was such a sense of pride and elation in the group that it was a memory I’ll never forget.