Play BackSide Ball

#First Thoughts - August 27th 2019

This is my game submission for JS13KGAMES. It’s also the first HTML5 canvas game I ever made. And the 2nd html/javascript game I ever made. The first game was a straight html/javascript pong game that was only minimally modified from the tutorial.

I had just finished playing with that game when I saw the js13kgames contest and I thought wouldn’t it be fun to get a t-shirt! So I thought I feel like I undertand this html javascript stuff now I can do this. I thought what if I could make a hacky-sack version of pong that would be cool, instead of hitting it off paddles you hit it off knees and feet. That’s when I started googling how to make javascript html games adjust automatically for a screen and I realized that canvas would make this much easier. So I found another tutorial for pong using canvas and spent a few hours wrapping my head around how it worked, then I started modifying it to make it work for my hacky idea, and to make it automatically adjust to screen size changes.

I had this wonderful fun idea about how to make it look like it was bouncing off a 3d wall instead of the edges of the screen which is when I realized, this doesn’t look like hacky-sack it looks like wall ball or squash… so I had to decide change my idea or start researching gravity imitating ball movements… did find a way to do it for next time… but for now I thought I’d go with wall ball, I chose it over squash because I prefer one person games to 2 person and I didn’t want to code a basic AI that wouldn’t be competative enough and I don’t have enough confidence to code a good one.

I still want to make it respond to touch events so it will be a real mobile game, right now it only takes keyboard input. I also want to make it so if you go over a certain score you level up to 2 balls, and so on. There’s a bug where you can get the ball lined up in one spot and let it keep going up and down to get a huge score and multiple balls will eliminate that.