Another really simple game I recreated in C++, as a test for my even newer development environment featuring neovim, clangd, coq_nvim, and a bit of custom lua code I wrote to manage my projects.
Pong isn't that simple.
This project taught me more than I anticipated. Like using SDL2, and working with cmake. I also got to take my new setup with neovim, its plugins and my custom scripts for a test ride. I learned the quirks of working with CMake. I used CMake to build this app for different platforms. I learned how to integrate CMake into my development routine, by making it generate compile_commands.json and letting my clangd (my language server) use it.
Apart from that, the game logic also took longer than I expected. The most interesting part is that the way the ball bounces is actually entirely dependant on which part of the paddle hits it, and not at all dependant on the velocity and angle of the ball prior to impact.
Figuring out an approximation of the algorithm used in the original pong was easily the part that took me the longest amount of time.
I also had to implement my own geometry functions. Although my geometry subroutines in this app are by no means a complete library, I implemented collision functions between circles, rectangles, lines, and line segments of arbitrary sizes from scratch.
If you're on linux or similar run:
mkdir -p build/
cmake . -B build/
cd build
make
./pong
The above shouldn't be very complicated if you already know how to use CMake.
If you're on windows, just build using cmake.
Note that you have to have SDL2 and SDL2_ttf installed before building, regardless of platform.