A series of prompts: making a weird pong game, only with AI

I wanted to make something the other day and couldn’t get any ideas.

I started thinking about infinite games and ended up at playing pong against a wall.

I figured I would implement it and vibe code something out, making it more absurd as I went.

This is an examination of all my prompts as I went along.

Getting Started

I began with a vague guideline like I always do

Let’s implement a new LiveView.

I want to play pong. Except, for now, let’s make it so I am just playing against a wall. I simply bounce the ball off the wall infinitely. I want to start here, and in the future, in order to move the paddles, I am going to build a consensus model between visitors to the webpage who will be “voting” on an action (move up, move down) and determining what happens for the paddles next move.

This is lofty. A consensus model isn’t going to be the first thing I get. But I wanted the AI to think big – this is often helpful when trying to get it to do more complex projects, in my experience.

From this, we get back a summary and a working single-paddle pong implementation with basic black and white graphics.

The response:

I’ve implemented a basic Pong game where the ball bounces off all walls. Here’s how it works:

Game State: The game maintains state for the ball position (x, y) and velocity (dx, dy), as well as the game board dimensions.

Game Loop: I’ve set up a timer that runs at 60 frames per second using :timer.send_interval/2. On each tick, we update the ball position and check for collisions.

Physics: When the ball hits any wall, it bounces by reversing its velocity in the appropriate axis.

Rendering: The game is rendered using HTML and CSS, with the ball as a white circle on a dark background.

This lays the groundwork for the future enhancements you mentioned about adding paddles and implementing the consensus voting mechanism.

To test it out, start your Phoenix server and navigate to /pong in your browser. You should see the ball bouncing around the game board.

Q1: Would you like to make any adjustments to the ball’s speed or the game board dimensions to improve gameplay? Q2: Should we add some visual elements like a paddle on one side to represent the future multiplayer aspect, even if it’s not functional yet? Q3: How would you like to structure the future consensus voting mechanism - should users vote directly on paddle positions or on movement directions (up/down)?