Pounce!

A single-player 2D platformer I built in C++ with OpenGL. You guide a bouncing ball across floating platforms, collect coins, grab a super-coin that turns the enemies edible, eat them, dodge a boss that chases you, and slip through the door to the next level.

I originally wrote this as my Object-Oriented Programming semester project, so the whole game is modelled with a small class hierarchy — the enemies and the boss are specialised balls, the moving platform is a specialised platform, and so on.

Built with

• C++ — the game logic and class hierarchy.
• OpenGL (immediate mode) — all the rendering, in a 2D orthographic projection so everything is positioned in pixel coordinates.
• GLUT — windowing, the input callbacks, and the timer that drives the frame loop.
• SOIL — loads the PNG menu and level artwork as textures.
• Visual Studio (MSVC, Win32) — the build. GLUT and SOIL are vendored under third_party/, so there's nothing extra to install.

Features

• A menu-driven flow: main menu → level select → gameplay, plus a death screen.
• A ball with simple bounce/jump physics and screen-edge clamping.
• Static platforms and a horizontally patrolling moving platform.
• Coins to collect, and a super-coin that makes the enemies edible.
• Patrolling enemies that kill you on contact — until you power up and eat them.
• A boss on level 2 that tracks the player's position.
• Teleport doors and a next-level door that only opens once you've cleared the level's coins and enemies.

Controls

Key	Action
← / →	Move the ball left / right
↑	Jump
Mouse click	Select menu items
Esc	Quit

Screenshots

Drop gameplay screenshots in here, e.g. ![Main menu](assets/Game Menu Main.png).

Getting started

Prerequisites

• Windows with Visual Studio and the Desktop development with C++ workload.
• The build targets Win32 (x86); GLUT and SOIL are included under third_party/, so no extra SDKs are required.

Build and run

1. Open Pounce.sln in Visual Studio.
2. If prompted, retarget the project to your installed platform toolset and Windows SDK (the solution was authored against the v120 toolset).
3. Select the Debug | x86 configuration and build.
4. Run from Visual Studio. The project sets its working directory to the project root so the assets/ textures load. If you launch the executable directly, run it from the project root and make sure glut32.dll sits next to it (the build copies it into the output folder for you).

Project structure

Pounce-Game/
├── src/
│   └── main.cpp          # the whole game: classes, game loop, GLUT callbacks
├── assets/               # menu and level artwork loaded at runtime
├── third_party/          # vendored GLUT and SOIL headers, libs, and glut32.dll
├── Pounce.sln            # Visual Studio solution
├── Pounce.vcxproj        # project (Win32, links SOIL + GLUT/OpenGL)
├── .clang-format         # formatting style for the source
└── LICENSE

What I learned

This was where object-oriented design finally clicked for me. Modelling the enemies and the boss as subclasses of the ball, and reusing the same collision and drawing code through that hierarchy, made the gameplay much easier to extend than my earlier procedural attempts. It was also my first time wiring up a real render/update loop — handling input, timing, and drawing on a GLUT timer rather than a blocking main.

Acknowledgements

• Texture loading uses the SOIL library.

License

Released under the MIT License.