Practice Pong

I’ve written another mini JavaScript game for fun.  This one is called Practice Pong.  There is only one player, and you just bounce a ball against a bunch of walls, but you get points and it gets harder to keep up with the ball after each hit.  The goal is obviously to keep the ball within bounds and rack up as many points as you can.  When you lose, there is a quick link to post your score on Twitter.  My highest so far is 55 points.

It was written for Firefox 3 as it uses no images.  The red ball is in fact just a div with some Firefox-only css (-moz-border-radius is my best friend).  Here is an excerpt from the help to get you started:

The goal of the game is to keep the ball inside the box using the paddle. The paddle will follow your mouse movements from inside the playing area. To start the game, just click anywhere inside the box.

There are a few improvements I’d like to make.  Some are not so interesting technically but are important for the game to feel complete; things like proper pausing (it is kind of screwed up right now) and restarting the game (for now you can just refresh the page).  On the flip side are some much more interesting technical bits like adding interactive sounds.  I’ve got half a mind to encode all the sounds directly into JavaScript using data urls. It’s one of those things that sounds so wrong, yet so right.

As usual, for posterity’s sake, here is a screenshot.  To try the game out for yourself, go to http://carduner.net/pong