Pong is playable, and it has four worlds

Our first game is done enough to show people.

It is Pong, which is the oldest idea in games, and that is the point: everyone already knows the rules, so nobody has to be taught anything. Two players share one keyboard — W and S on the left, the arrow keys on the right — or one person can take on the robot. First to five wins. On a phone you hold a thumb on your half of the screen.

What makes it ours is where you play it. There are four worlds, and the ball, the paddles and the crowd all belong to whichever one you pick:

• Cosmos — stars rushing past.
• Forest — a wood that never ends.
• War — a battle nobody wins.
• Zombies — they keep coming.

None of those are pictures. Every world is drawn in code, which sounds like a technical detail and is really a family one: it means the number that decides how fast the stars go, or how many zombies crowd the edge of the court, is a line anybody at the table can change. That file is called tuning.ts, it has no logic in it at all, and it is the most-edited file in the whole project.

The rules live in their own package with no game engine anywhere near them. That sounds like extra work and it saves time constantly — the whole game can be played thousands of times a second in a terminal with nothing on screen, which is how we know a change to the bounce did not quietly break the scoring.

Go and play it. It is free, it runs in a browser, and there is nothing to install.