Sideline Hero

About this game

Sideline Hero is an arcade game about the sideline cut, which is the best skill in hurling and the one most likely to be attempted by people who cannot do it. You get one input: touch anywhere, flick up, let go. A harder flick strikes it further and angling the flick bends the shot. Everything after that is watching what you have done.

Each cut gives you a choice. Find a teammate in space and the move stays alive, or take it on straight over the bar for considerably more. Three wides ends the run, so the whole thing is a running argument between the safe ball and the one worth having. Points build a combo, and the combo is where a real score comes from.

Everything is deterministic, which is the point

A run is a random seed plus a list of flicks. The sidelines, the wind, the teammate positions, the bounces and the commentary all regenerate from that seed. It means a challenge link is about sixty bytes and rides in the URL, so sending someone your exact run needs no account, no matchmaking and no database. Your ghost replays identically on their phone, and the two of you cannot disagree about the score, because the live game, the ghost and the bot all run the same code.

The flight is solved the instant your thumb lifts rather than stepped frame by frame, so the game knows the shot is a beauty before the ball has moved. That is what lets the crack of the hurley be pitched to the quality of the strike with no lag. There is an assist, but it is a solver rather than a fudge: aim clearly at the posts and it works out the power that clears the bar and the aim that beats the crosswind, then pulls you part of the way there. Outside a narrow cone it does nothing at all.

The run ends with a look at what did it

When the last sliotar goes, the final approach drops into slow motion and the camera travels in low along the line of flight, holding on the ball where it came to rest. You finish with an explanation rather than a scorecard, which only works because the hazards are positional: to end up in the hedge you have to actually reach the hedge. Roughly half of all endings have a defender standing over the ball, a tenth land in the crowd, and a quarter are a lonely ball on open grass.

All the audio is synthesised at runtime, so there is nothing to load and the music gains layers as the combo climbs. There is a daily challenge seeded from the date, so everyone gets the same sidelines on the same day.