One Shot
One swing at the pin. Same course for everyone today.
How to Play One Shot
- Read the course before you touch anything. The wind pushes the whole flight sideways and the bars have one gap you can fit through.
- Pull back to set angle and power. The line shows where you are pointing, never where the shot will land.
- Let go. That is your swing for this course — the closer you finish to the pin, the higher the score.
Controls
| Keyboard | Arrow keys to aim, Space to swing |
|---|---|
| Touch | Pull back anywhere and release |
Tips
- Power is forgiving and angle is not. If you keep missing to one side, change the angle before you change the strength.
- The shot clock runs fifteen seconds, far longer than reading a course takes. A rushed swing is the one that misses the gap.
About One Shot
A single swing at the pin. Read the wind, thread the one gap in the bars, and let go — there is no second ball, and everyone plays the same course today. It runs directly in your browser with no download or sign-up, on desktop and mobile alike.
Design notes: how One Shot was built
The trajectory is never drawn. That is the entire game: showing an aim line would turn a round of reading and judging into a round of tracing a line, and the tension of having exactly one shot would go with it. What you get instead is a twelve-degree spread cone, a wind vector, and fifteen seconds on the shot clock. Everything else you have to estimate.
The course is not random. A deterministic mulberry32 generator seeded from the UTC date builds one course that every player gets on a given day, which is what makes comparing a score meaningful. Obstacle gaps are not scattered either — they are placed along the ideal trajectory to the pin, derived from the parabola with xFrac = 1 - sqrt(1 - hFrac), so the bars sit exactly where a perfect shot wants to be rather than wherever a random number generator put them.
Physics runs six substeps per frame. With a single step per frame a fast ball can pass straight through a thin bar between one position and the next, and in a one-shot game that bug is indistinguishable from a lucky shot. This is also the game that made the automated play gate learn about session: 'single-shot': a robot tester fires immediately and therefore always scores a terrible survival time, which said nothing about the game. The gate now judges whether the round gives a person time to think instead — that mechanism is described here.
More of these in the dev notes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I play today's course more than once?
Today's course is one swing, and it is the same course for everyone. Practice courses afterwards are unlimited and do not count.
Why can't I see where the shot will land?
An arc preview would turn reading the course into matching a line. The wind, the gap and the green are all shown instead, so the judgement is yours.
Does the wind really change anything?
Yes. It pushes the ball sideways for the whole flight, and the flag leans the way it blows so you can read it before you swing.
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