Pong, taken way too far.

Two paddles and a ball; then special balls, power-ups, gravity wells, closing walls, five game modes, an AI that plays to win, and online head-to-head matches.

Browser game on HTML5 Canvas. No frameworks, no build step, no browser dependencies. Clone it, open it, play.

Nothing to install; solo, AI-vs-AI, and online rooms all run in the browser.

Or run it yourself. Nothing to compile either way:

Single-player - static files, needs Node.js 18+:

npm run dev        # http://localhost:8280

Player-vs-Player - also runs the room server, needs Docker:

docker compose up -d      # http://localhost:8280

Special balls: gold (3 pts), phantom (2 pts, blinks out of sight), comet (2 pts, small and fast), heavy (slow tank), splitter (splits on its first paddle hit). Any ball at top speed ignites and is worth at least 2.

Power-ups: big paddle, shrink opponent, multiball, ball storm, slow-mo, ghost paddle (an AI helper on your side), catch zone (grab the ball, aim it, fire it back), and flip (swaps the whole arena mid-match).

Arena events: gravity wells that bend ball paths, teleport portals, and wind gusts. Which ones appear scales with difficulty.

Rally combo: the longer a rally survives, the higher the speed cap climbs.

Difficulty handicaps you, not just the AI: paddle size, ball speed, fog that hides the ball, paddle wear, and control inversion.

Seven tiers from Relaxed to Impossible, plus Custom: where every ball type, power-up, arena event, curse, and AI skill level is individually toggleable.

Each side's color is yours to pick from an eight-color palette (bone, ember, amber, moss, teal, slate, violet, rose). Your choice is saved locally and drives the whole UI: paddles, goal zones, scores, menu accents, and the title.

Colors are a local preference: in an online match each player keeps their own, and both still see themselves on the right.

The stack is two containers:

• web: Nginx serves the game and proxies same-origin /ws.
• server: Node/WebSocket service owning Player-vs-Player rooms.

docker compose up -d     # http://localhost:8280
docker compose down

Only the web container is published; the room service stays on Docker's internal network.

Single-player needs nothing but a static server:

npm run dev        # serves app/ at http://localhost:8280

Edit anything in app/ and refresh. There's nothing to compile.

To run just the room server (port 8280):

npm install
npm start

Player-vs-Player is the one thing that needs Compose, because it requires the room server behind a same-origin /ws proxy, which is exactly what the nginx container provides.

Deploy the Compose stack to any Docker-capable host that supports persistent WebSockets. For public HTTPS, terminate TLS at a reverse proxy in front of the web container; the browser then upgrades /ws to secure wss:// automatically.

Set the origin allowlist in production by editing PONG_ALLOWED_ORIGINS on the server service in docker-compose.yml:

    environment:
      PONG_ALLOWED_ORIGINS: "https://example.com"

Leaving it empty allows any origin, which is convenient locally but not what you want on a public host.

MIT