Cloud Pong

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.

Non-goals, limitations, and constraints

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.

Running the app

To run locally:

npm run dev

To deploy:

Prerequisites

1. Create an account and a database on Upstash .

   Choose the regional database: `US-CENTRAL-1. This is currently the only choice for Upstash. This region generally should coincide with the Google Cloud region that you'll use for Cloud Run for optimal performance. Don't choose the Global option.

2. Select or create a Cloud Platform project .

3. Enable billing for your project ( learn more about Google's Free Tier).

Set environment variables for

• PROJECT
• REGION
• SERVICE
• REDIS

For example:

export PROJECT=my-cloud-pong-project
export REGION=us-central1
export SERVICE=pong
export REDIS=redis://:PASSWORD@gusc1-whole-stork-30425.upstash.io:30425

From the project root directory, run the following script and enable APIs, as prompted:

scripts/run-deploy

After a successful deployment, the application URL will be printed to the output.