How I Started PBU Football
So last Thursday night I was watching football highlights on my phone, right? And I thought man I wish I could make a little football game for myself. Just something simple where I can kick the ball around. Didn’t want anything fancy like the big games, just basic stuff.
Building the Field
First thing Monday morning I grabbed my laptop and started drawing lines. Made a green rectangle for the pitch using this code tool I found online. Took me like three tries to get the dimensions looking right – first version looked like a skinny hot dog shape! Put white boundary lines using math coordinates, felt like doing geometry homework again. After like two hours finally had something resembling a football field.
Adding Players and Ball
Next I needed players. Made little circle dudes with different colors for teams. Had to figure out how to make them move using keyboard arrows. That part made me wanna smash my keyboard honestly. Whenever I pressed two keys at once the players would just zoom into the corner and disappear! Fixed it by making them stop when they hit field edges. Then made a ball that wobbles when you kick it – that part was actually fun.
The Epic Goal Disaster
Here’s where things got messy. Trying to program scoring was a nightmare. At first the ball would just fly through the goalposts like ghosts! Had to create this invisible wall behind the posts. Then the ball kept getting stuck in the net like laundry in a dryer. My coding looked like spaghetti after trying different solutions:
- Made net bouncier = ball ping-ponged everywhere
- Tried thinner goalposts = players got stuck in them
- Added “swallow ball” code = whole game crashed
Spent two whole evenings fixing this mess while eating cold pizza.
How My Dog “Helped”
Wednesday night I was testing the game when my dog Bruno jumped on my lap. His tail smashed my keyboard and somehow scored three goals at once! That mutt broke my scoring system completely. Instead of being mad I watched how his tail hit the keys and realized I had the button combos all wrong. Bruno basically debugged my game with his wagging tail. Best coding partner ever even if he did drool on my spacebar.
Final Touches
After fixing the scoring thing I added crowd noises – just some booing and cheering sound files I recorded myself making weird noises. Put in a janky referee whistle that sounds like a dying tea kettle. The game looks rougher than my beard after camping weekend but hey it works! You can actually pass the ball between players now and score without everything breaking. Not bad for something built between coffee breaks and fixing Bruno’s paw prints off my laptop screen.
