schmelczer-dev/src/content/work/avoid-early-web-game.md

title	description	date	period	thumbnail	article	project
Avoid	My first browser game, and later the handout for a small JS/Canvas workshop. Kept around so the timeline stays honest.	2026-04-29	January 2018	src alt ./_assets/avoid.jpg Screenshot of the Avoid web game.	tags role stack outcome audience games web Game author JavaScript Canvas My first browser game; kept for the timeline, reused for teaching general	description thumbnail My first browser game, kept around so the timeline is honest. alt Screenshot of the Avoid canvas game.

January 2018, my first browser game. You're a peach-coloured dot; red 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.