Alright, so someone asked me about this “fonio tennis” thing I was messing around with. It wasn’t exactly a world-changing project, let me tell you, but it was… an experience. It all started pretty casually, I was just looking for something to tinker with, you know? Keep the old brain cells from turning to mush.
I figured, “fonio tennis,” what could that be? My first thought, honestly, was maybe some weird new health food craze mixed with sports. But no, for me, it became this little coding challenge I set myself. Sounded simple enough: make a tiny game. The “fonio” part would be the theme, maybe the ball or some obstacles. The “tennis” was, well, supposed to be the gameplay. Easy peasy, right? Wrong.
So, I dusted off my old laptop. It groans more than I do in the morning. I wasn’t about to learn some fancy new game engine for this. Nah, I thought I’d just cobble something together with basic stuff I already knew. My plan was to get a little pixelated fonio grain bouncing back and forth. How hard could that be?
Well, turns out, pretty darn hard when you’re just winging it. First, drawing something that actually looked like a fonio grain and not just a random beige speck took longer than I’d care to admit. Then came the “tennis” part. Getting that little speck to move, to bounce off “paddles” – or what I imagined as paddles – was a real fight. It was like actual tennis, me versus the stubborn lines of code. I’d try one thing, the “ball” would fly off the screen. I’d try another, it would stick to the paddle like glue. Frustrating doesn’t even begin to cover it.
I spent a good few evenings just staring at the screen, tweaking values, changing logic. One minute I thought I was a genius, the next I was convinced I’d forgotten everything I ever knew about programming. My “paddles” were just simple rectangles, and getting them to move smoothly with key presses felt like I was trying to steer a broken shopping cart.
Eventually, after a lot of back and forth, a lot of sighs, and probably too much coffee, I got something. And I mean something very basic. The fonio-speck moved. It bounced, sort of. You could hit it with the rectangles. It wasn’t going to win any awards, that’s for sure. It was clunky. The physics were laughable. But technically, it was “fonio tennis,” my version of it anyway.
What did I really achieve? Well, I proved to myself I could still wrestle with code, even if the code usually won a few rounds. And I learned that sometimes the simplest-sounding ideas can turn into a real time sink. “Fonio tennis” wasn’t the masterpiece I jokingly imagined. It was more of a reminder that making things, even silly little things, takes effort. Lots of it. And that maybe fonio is best left for breakfast, not for digital sports on my creaky old laptop.
