Case study
A boy against his pug, and the start of a sports engine
The first sports game in the Ziggy Games arcade: soccer between Ziggy and Pam, playable from two cameras, built so more sports could follow without rebuilding the basics each time.
The ask was "Ziggy and Pam Sports Arena": many small games, soccer first, Ziggy against Pam, playable from a raised side camera and a bird's-eye camera, and built from the drawings of Ziggy and Pam that already existed.
It also had to work alone against the computer, with a friend on the same keyboard, and on a phone.
Instead of rebuilding the characters in 3D, the game reuses the existing flat drawings of Ziggy and Pam. Ground points use true perspective and heights are drawn straight up at that point's scale, so flat side-view characters stand up from either camera.
Arena soccer with rounded boards means no out-of-bounds. Matches run two or four minutes, with a golden goal if the score is tied.
Ziggy has the bigger kick, volleys, headers and a slide tackle. Pam is quicker, dribbles closer and pounces. Either can win.
The camera, characters, ball, arena art, controls and sound live in one shared folder. A new sport adds its own rules, computer player and drawing on top.
Each round started with somebody playing the latest build and saying what was wrong. Here is what they said, and what changed.
Feedback
Dribbling loses the ball when you run up or down the screen.
What changed
Dribbling was rebuilt as possession: the player in control holds the ball out front and it swings around on turns. A tackle weighs the tackler against the dribbler's grip, with a big bonus for stepping into their path. The levels were then reset with simulated matches: a kid-level bot beats Easy, splits Medium and loses to Hard.
Feedback
Make a copy of the game, plus exactly how it was made, to build a different soccer game from the same assets.
What changed
That copy became the Ziggy & Pam Soccer Kit, with a build log explaining every step and decision. Soccer Kids, Hockey Kids and Pickle Kids all grew from it.
Flat side-view drawings should look wrong from above. Drawing heights straight up the screen at each ground point's scale, the way classic 2D sports games do, keeps them upright in both views, and a ball at head height still lines up with a head.
A timing test that read pixels back from the canvas reported 90 millisecond frames. Reading pixels makes Chrome move the canvas off the graphics card, and the real frame took 1.5 milliseconds. The game is timed another way now and never reads the canvas back.
Browsers held on to old game files for hours, so an update could arrive half new and half old. Every file is now published under a name made from its contents, so a changed file always has a new address.
The game is plain JavaScript modules drawn on a canvas. The match lives in a deterministic simulation that steps 120 times a second and runs in Node, so whole matches can be tested without a browser. Ziggy and Pam are posed from their motion on the field each frame.
The sound is made in the browser with Web Audio, with no audio files to download. Settings and the record against each level are kept on the device.
Live on ziggy.games since October 5, 2026. The hub keeps a coming-soon tile for the next sport, and its code is the starter kit every paper-kid sports game has been built from since.
What this means for your game
Your pet can be more than a face in the crowd. Pam is a full player here, with her own speed and moves, and yours can be too.
We build games around one kid, one team or one school, the same way we built this one: with the people who will play it in the loop. Start with your player.
