And sometimes, that is enough.
BTTS is the perfect codebase for a junior developer. It is not a sprawling React monstrosity with 400 dependencies. It is a few hundred lines of tightly-written JavaScript. Want to learn how requestAnimationFrame works? Want to understand collision detection (AABB collision, specifically)? Want to see how to manage game state without a framework? Clone the repo. The answers are all there, visualized in real-time. big tower tiny square github
It is a reminder that at the bottom of every towering monolith of code we build—every microservice, every database migration, every CI pipeline—there is just a tiny square trying to get from point A to point B without crashing. And sometimes, that is enough
I am talking, of course, about the (BTTS) repository on GitHub. It is a few hundred lines of tightly-written JavaScript
The most successful forks of BTTS aren't the ones with the best graphics; they are the ones with the clearest README.md . The repo that includes a diagram of the collision response vector is the repo that gets the stars.
The original game has a "bug" where if you jump at a specific frame rate, you clip through a corner. Ethan didn't fix it for months. Why? Because it felt like a "technique." In open source, a quirky feature is better than a perfect, non-existent patch.