A kysz! (Polish for “shoo!”) started as a joke page: a monospace countdown to some far-away date and, under it, a line of news headlines that keep scrambling into each other. Press Space and the page turns into an arcade game in which words from those headlines are the enemies.
Open the game full screen → Click inside the frame first so it gets the keyboard.
How to play#
Space starts the game, and on phones you just tap one of the modes.
- Shooter. Words of a headline fall from the top of the screen, each at its own speed, and you move with the arrows and shoot with Space. Clear one headline and the next comes faster. Let three words past your line and you’re out; your score is how long you survived.
- Arkanoid. Here the words are bricks, and you bounce a ball off your paddle to break them. Every cleared wall brings a faster one, and you lose a life whenever the ball falls past the paddle.
Now and then destroyed words drop flickering “eggs”. You have to catch one to find out what’s inside: an extra life, a shield against one hit, slow motion, triple shots (or extra balls in Arkanoid) or wider shots (or a wider paddle).
On touch screens a control strip shows up under the board. Drag along it to move, tap the dot to shoot and tap the cross to leave.
How it is built#
I wrote the game in TypeScript with Phaser 3. I wanted the joke page to stay light, so the countdown and ticker load first, and Phaser with the rest of the game comes in only when you start playing. Keyboard and touch input go through one layer, which is why all modes work on phones as well.
On its original server a small PHP backend collects fresh headlines from several Polish news sites every 12 hours and keeps a global record. This copy is static: headlines come from a saved list of about 11,000 of them, and records are kept only in your browser.