mBasketball

About mBasketball

Basketball, on a phone, with a thumb.

You are at the line looking at the hoop. A crosshair wanders about the square behind the ring and never stops moving. Swipe up to wind the shot and let go on the spot you want -- the aim is taken the instant your thumb leaves the glass, so the shot is two things at once: where it was when you let go, and how far you pulled.

THE SAME SHOT AS THE DESKTOP GAME

The physics is Basketball.py's, carried across rather than approximated: the arc over the ring, the speed a given distance needs, the rim the ball can catch and rattle out of, the glass it can come off, and the net it drops through. Every shot here would land where the same shot lands on the desktop.

TWO WAYS TO LOOK AT IT

2D-Canvas is the desktop game's own face -- one lamp, everything shaded against it, drawn rather than photographed. Solid 3D is the same court in real three dimensions through three.js: a sphere for the ball, a net that hangs, and shadows that are cast rather than painted. A switch, either way, at any time.

FOUR GAMES

Frenzy, sixty seconds, and everything in the last ten counts twice. Rapid fire, forty-five seconds with the ball coming straight back. Twenty-five shots with no clock. And Around the 3 point line, where you drag sideways to walk round the arc and shoot from wherever you are standing -- every one of them a three.

THREE WAYS TO SHOOT

Arcade #2, the wandering crosshair that never stops. Drift, which wanders on its own and shoots itself when you tap. And Swipe, with no crosshair at all: how straight you swipe decides whether it goes left, right or through the middle, and how far you swipe decides how hard.

THE SOUND IS WORKED OUT, NOT RECORDED

The tin off the rim, the glass, the net and the horn are synthesised from their partials, so the rim rings like metal rather than like a sample played twice. Each has its own switch: the ring can go and leave the swoosh, or the sound can go altogether and leave only the ball going in.

THE REST OF IT

Three dribbles at your feet before each shot, the way a player settles at the line. The board lights at the hoop when one drops, where you are already looking. A buzz when it goes in. Your best run kept, and a live streak. Five floors. Unlimited shots, for practising without a scoreboard every forty-five seconds.

NOTHING LEAVES THE PHONE

No account, no advertising, and nothing fetched from the internet: the page talks to the app over a socket only this app can reach, with a key made fresh each time it starts. three.js travels inside the app rather than being downloaded.

WHAT CHANGED IN THIS BUILD

The rim is honest now. A ball that rattled on the ring and came out could be counted as a basket while it was already dropping away underneath the hoop -- an in-and-out, with the swoosh and the scoreboard both going off for a shot that had missed. The ball has to cross the plane of the ring on its way down to count, and nothing below the ring counts at all.

It is also judged in the right place. A frame of the game is three or four inches of fall, and the ball is travelling sideways the whole time, while the ring leaves only four and a quarter inches of room around a ball that fits -- so asking the question at the end of the frame asked it inches past the ring. It is now asked at the exact point the ball passed the ring's height, and a bounce comes off the ring itself rather than off a spot the ball had already gone by. Over 7,503 simulated shots that removed 64 baskets which had been given with the ball as much as 41 inches below the rim.

WHO MADE IT

A LinuxDoors.com program. Programmer: Stan Switaj. Version 0.2, an early version. Bug reports to bugs-report-mbasketball@linuxdoors.com.

What it is for

A basketball game on a phone is usually one of two things: a cartoon with a meter that fills, or a physics demo that wants two hands and a tablet. Neither is the thing you actually want on a phone, which is one movement of one thumb that decides both where the ball goes and how hard it is thrown, and a ball that then behaves.

This is the shot from the desktop game with a phone's gesture in front of it. The swipe is the shot: let go early and it falls short, let go on the wrong side of the square and it rattles out. Sixty seconds is exactly as long as a game on a phone should be, and the ball comes back on its own.

What it looks like

What you are downloading

Checksum of the file

d21426df 787ba9f9 1ad8cf7c cfa48769 731ae3d8 1cad633a c237fff4 823d8f3a

Signed by

ad4e995f 68fe28e3 9ed7ff9a 5f3ca093 9fef92f0 91b7b9ce 18eec888 c3a12f30

Every version of this app is signed with the same key. If that second value ever changes, it did not come from the same hands — and Android will refuse to install it over the one you have.

Earlier versions