Purrball

A juggle, not a rally against an opponent

There's no one hitting the ball back at you — gravity pulls it down continuously, and your one racket is the only thing keeping it off the ground. The cat rides along with your racket for the company, not as a second player. Move to get under the ball before it falls past you; every clean hit sends it back up and adds to your rally count.

The racket shrinks as you go

Speed alone doesn't make this harder over time — gravity and racket size both shift together the longer a rally runs, so a comfortable rhythm at rally 5 gets a genuinely tighter margin for error by rally 30. It never shrinks below a usable minimum, so a long rally stays about skill and positioning, not an unreachable pixel-hunt.

Why gravity alone wasn't enough

An earlier version of this game only sped gravity up as the rally grew, on the assumption that faster falls would naturally get harder over time. Bot-testing before shipping caught that this doesn't actually work: raising gravity shortens the time between bounces, but it shortens the ball's horizontal travel by roughly the same proportion, so the two effects cancel out — a script that could track the ball at all kept surviving indefinitely regardless of how high gravity climbed. Shrinking the racket alongside gravity is what actually makes a long rally test skill rather than just early luck with the ball's spawn position.

Getting under the ball early

Because the racket has real width but the ball's landing point is only precisely knowable once it's close, the strongest habit is tracking the ball's horizontal position continuously rather than waiting until it's near the racket height to react — small, early corrections keep the racket centered under the ball's actual path, while large last-second corrections are what cause most drops once the racket has shrunk down toward its minimum size.