Retro Pong

The story

I rebuilt Pong to see how much game feel I could get out of a canvas and nothing else. No libraries, no framework: a hand-rolled game loop, collision code, three AI difficulty levels, local two-player, CRT-style visuals, and sound synthesized with the Web Audio API. First to 7 wins. You can play it right here on the site.

What I learned

1. 01Game feel comes almost entirely from small things, the angle the ball leaves the paddle and the way the AI misses, not from the physics being correct.
2. 02Web Audio meant no sound files at all, every blip is synthesized at runtime, which kept the whole game to a page that loads instantly.
3. 03Three difficulty levels are really three different amounts of deliberate imperfection in how the AI tracks the ball.
4. 04Writing the game loop by hand is worth doing once, because it is the part every engine is quietly handling for you.