Building an air-hockey rival

Air-hockey is probably one of the most popular games enjoyed by players of all ages during the golden age of arcades, and it is still played everywhere. With the advent of touchscreen mobile devices, developing an air-hockey game is a fun way to not only test physics engines, but to also develop intelligent rivals despite the apparent low complexity of the game.

Getting ready

This is a technique based on top of some of the algorithms that we learned in Chapter 1, Behaviors – Intelligent Movement, such as Seek, Arrive, and Leave, and the Raycasting knowledge that is employed in several other recipes, such as path smoothing.

It is necessary for the paddle game object to be used by the agent...