About 15 years ago, I had a Huawei smartphone with a lock screen made of little squares. When you tapped a square, colored lines radiated out of it. The squares were tiny—about a millimeter each—and on sleepless nights, when I couldn’t justify playing games anymore, I would just tap them, sending lines across the screen.
That’s where the idea for a simple game came from: send lines to collide head-on as many times as possible. Tap fast, tap accurately, that’s the essense
Around the early 2010s, I built a version of this idea in raw JavaScript. It could count points, and — as in programming my hands are tightly attached to my pelvis rather than my shoulders —it slowly started consuming memory over time and got harder and harder. Emergent difficulty by way of poor optimization.
In 2017 or 2018, I revisited the idea and started building it in Unity. I worked on it during evenings and weekends, but dropped it when I got sick — and never really came back. That was my first burnout experience, and I remember learning that 80-hour weeks don’t actually work. The new version became more like an arkanoid: a ball appears in the center, and you have to draw lines to keep it from escaping the screen. The ball speeds up over time, and the shorter your lines, the more points you get.
Last week, I shipped a version of this game — again in plain JavaScript — on my website. The vibe coding took just a couple of hours. It feels like a great excuse to keep building out my site again.
Try the game here (desktop only for now): https://misha.games/games/bouncing/. Heads up: in the first run, the ball flies like a maniac for some reason—just hit restart and you’ll be fine.
About the site: it's in English, but when I publish any kind of post or article, I’ll also provide a Russian version — either in the telegram blog or here on the site (I’ve been meaning to experiment with more interactive formats for a while now).
And about me: why do I keep trying different formats? Telegram blog, YouTube, Reels, this site — why do I abandon them and start over again? I guess I abandon because sometimes I wonder if the world really needs another format, and I keep doing it because I need them. Sure, part of me hopes that someday all these formats will turn into fame, and a wizard in a blue helicopter will invite me to the VIP Billionaire Club™. But honestly, even if I knew for sure that wizard’s not coming — sometimes I just can’t help myself, and I have to write, to film, to code.