This demo is meant to be a fun retro nod to Pong, a classic table tennis style game with two paddles and a ball. It was the first video game to achieve commercial success and is indelibly imprinted as an iconic example of the early arcade game industry.
This version is meant to be played over the web. Wireframes of the desired user experience are located under doc/design.
The demo shows how to create a serverless web app (deployed to Cloud Run) with bidirectional streaming (using websockets) and distributed game state storage and synchronization using Redis.
As a technology demo, the game should be amusing to play, although creating a real-world production gaming application is a non-goal.
As a browser-based game, optimizations (such as using UDP packets or gRPC bidirectional streaming) aren't available.
Techniques, such as using prediction to mitigate latency, could potentially be explored, but (at least for now) the game will have the constraint that players will be matched from the same region only.
npm run dev
- Select or create a Cloud Platform project .
- Enable billing for your project ( learn more about Google's Free Tier).
Set environment variables for
PROJECTREGIONSERVICE
For example:
export PROJECT=my-cloud-pong-project
export REGION=us-central1
export SERVICE=pong
From the project root directory, run the following script and enable APIs, as prompted:
scripts/run-deploy