Paddle

I wanted something simple. Two paddles. A ball. First to seven. That's it. I thought it would take a day. It took a day. Then I spent four more days adding things nobody asked for. Particle effects when the ball hits. Screen shake on a score. A countdown timer. A win streak counter. I have a problem.

The computer opponent has three modes. Easy is friendly. It misses on purpose sometimes. Medium plays fair. Hard is mean. It reacts faster, predicts better, and barely makes mistakes. I set it to Hard once and lost seven to nothing. To my own game. The game I wrote. I adjusted the difficulty curve after that. Slightly.

Two-player mode is in there too. Same screen, same keyboard. Player one gets W and S. Player two gets the arrow keys. No accounts. No matchmaking. Just two people and a ball. It's the way games used to be. My wife said it reminds her of college. I didn't ask what she meant by that.

The ball speeds up as the rally goes on. Long rallies get intense. The bounces come faster. Then someone scores and it all resets. I spent an embarrassing amount of time on the score sound effects. The win sound is four ascending notes. The lose sound is four descending ones. It's the little things. Or so I keep telling myself. Oh, and there are power-ups now. They spawn in the middle of the court during play. Big paddle. Tiny opponent. Speed surge. Slow field. The ball picks them up for whoever hit it last. I added those on a Tuesday. I was supposed to be done on Monday.