The Game

Pitch is real-time 3v3 arcade soccer built for the browser. One 90-second match, two teams — CORAL (you) vs AZUR (CPU) — on a walled pitch with working nets, posts, and rebounds. No menus, no league mode: whistle, kickoff, chaos, full time. If the score is level at zero, the match rolls into golden goal — next goal wins, however long it takes.

Core Loop

You control one player at a time (a gold ring and chevron mark them). Chase the loose ball, dribble with a soft magnetic touch, and read the two context actions: with the ball they are Shoot and Pass; without it they become Tackle (a committed sliding lunge with a cooldown) and Switch. Passing hands control to the receiver; a teammate winning a tackle hands control to them. Shots aim at the goal mouth and bend with your held direction, so near-post/far-post choices are yours. Walls keep the ball alive, so play is continuous and pinbally.

Controls

Touch & iPad: drag anywhere on the left side for a dynamic joystick; two large right-hand buttons — red for shoot/tackle, cream for pass/switch — relabel themselves with possession. On phones the whole pitch rotates 90° so portrait play uses the full screen; landscape works too. iPads can mix touch and keyboard freely.

Play button: a big tactile button to press at match start — no auto-play, no hidden menus.

Match Rules

• 90-second countdown clock with urgency ticks in the last five seconds
• Goals trigger a hit-stop, stadium flash, confetti in the scorer's color, and a kickoff for the conceding side
• Dribbling the ball over the line counts — walk-ins welcome
• Ties resolve by golden goal — every match produces a winner
• Win/loss record and best win streak persist in localStorage (pitch-arcade-save)

AI

Both squads run the same role system, re-assigned continuously: the nearest player chases (with ball-flight prediction and tackle attempts), one supports ahead of the ball looking for a lane, one defends the corridor between ball and goal. Carriers dribble around pressure, shoot inside range when the lane is open, and offload under pressure. The CPU runs at 94% of your top speed with slightly worse shot accuracy — beatable, never passive.

Visual & Audio

A "tiny arcade sports poster come alive": deep-green mown stripes, cream chalk lines, stadium light pools, dark stands full of shimmering crowd pixels that jump when someone scores. Ball trails, grass chips off tackles, screen shake, and a big italic GOAL! banner. All audio is procedural Web Audio — kick thumps, whistles, crowd-noise swells, a three-note goal horn — with a persistent mute toggle.

Technical Notes

Entirely self-contained: one HTML file, vanilla JavaScript + Canvas, no dependencies, no backend, no build step. The world simulates in fixed field coordinates and the renderer rotates the whole view for portrait screens. Auto-pauses when the tab is hidden. An AI-vs-AI attract match runs behind the title screen.

▶ Play Pitch

Second release in the Apps & Games monthly series — a new game every month.