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Andras Schmelczer 2026-07-10 10:57:09 -04:00
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---
title: Avoid
description: My first browser game, and later the handout for a small JS/Canvas workshop. Kept around so the timeline stays honest.
description: My first browser game, and later the handout for a JS/Canvas workshop at SchDesign, a society at the Budapest Technology University (BME). It's trivial yet I still have fun playing with it now, so it made the cut.
date: 2026-04-29
period: 'January 2018'
thumbnail:
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article:
tags: ['games', 'web']
stack: ['JavaScript', 'Canvas']
outcome: My first browser game; kept for the timeline, reused for teaching
project: {}
---
January 2018, my first browser game. You're a dot; other dots stream in from the edges and chase you; you have to out-manouver them to escape while getting them to collide with each other. The game is simple but rather fun, at least for the first few minutes.
This project marks my first encounter with the `<canvas>` element acting as the catalyst for my later (and still going) obsession with graphics programming.
January 2018, my first browser game. You're a dot; other dots stream in from the edges and chase you; the score counts how many the game has dared to spawn so far. It isn't good. I keep it here because pretending the older work didn't happen would be revisionism, and because it marks the moment a `<canvas>` element stopped being mysterious to me.
It had a second job, too. The README isn't documentation; it's the handout for a small JS/Canvas workshop, in Hungarian: what JavaScript is, what a 2D context gives you, why a game loop wants `requestAnimationFrame` and a delta time, why `var` is past tense. The little game turned out to be the right size for explaining things to people who'd never drawn a pixel from code before. The process advice in that handout (write working code first, then make it pretty) is still roughly the only process I follow.
When I archived the repo in 2022 I allowed myself to fix the retina scaling and make the page vaguely responsive, and then made myself stop.
A few months later I also reused this for our design society's web design workshop. We rebuilt the webpage based on the handout in the README while getting familiar with expressing art and movement through JavaScript. The little game turned out to be the right size for explaining things to people who'd never drawn a pixel from code before. The process advice in that handout (write working code first, then make it pretty) is still roughly the only process I follow.