Tight Window
American football under the lights, on both sides of the ball.
What it is
American football on a full field, eleven a side, four quarters under the lights. On offense, you begin as the quarterback. Pick a play from the playbook, take the snap, and find the open man while your line holds their rush. It holds as long as it can, and a blitz sends more than it can block, so the throw has to go into the window before it shuts. Hold Throw, point the stick at a receiver, and let go in the green.
Whoever has the ball is yours
A catch, a handoff or an interception hands you the man with it: steer him, spin out of a tackle, juke the man closing in, hurdle a man on the turf or dive for the line. On their ball you make the call (Base, Blitz, Deep or Run) and play the man you picked in Settings, a linebacker, a safety or an end, or let the coach play your defense while their drives go by at three times the pace.
A touchdown is six, then the try: kick for one, or run or throw it in for two. On fourth down the playbook opens on Special, for a field goal or a punt. Every kick is set before it’s kicked: hold Kick, let go in the green and lean the stick, and an arrow on the field shows the aim. Then the kicker runs up and does it, and now and then a field goal or a punt is blocked. The quarters are four minutes and each side has three timeouts a half. A tie in the semi-finals or the final goes to overtime, a possession each from the 25; in the weeks before, a tie stands.
A season
Eight sides, seven weeks, every side once, then the top four to the semi-finals and the final. The other games of the week are real games, played by the game itself while you play yours. Between games, the league: the week’s scores, the table, and practice, one part of your team a little better each week. Name your team, choose its colours and its crest, and keep your best games, your seasons and the season’s leaders in Records.
After a game, your best play comes back again, slowed at the moment. Stop it where you like, move the camera, and save a picture of it.
How to play
- Pick a playThe playbook along the foot
- MoveThe stick, bottom left
- Throw, kick and moreThe buttons, bottom right
- On their ballA call, then Tackle
- TimeoutUnder the score
The playbook has Run and Pass tabs, Special when there’s a kick, and Again for the last play. The buttons say what they do as the play changes: Throw, Next (it switches the receiver you’re throwing to, and the ring shows who), Spin, Juke, Hurdle, Dive and Kick. On their ball the four calls run along the foot, then Tackle, Break and Switch. Timeout sits under the score while your clock runs between plays.
How to play opens before your first game, and the ? brings it back. Settings, the gear at the top right, holds the sound, with its own volume for the music, the effects and the crowd, and who you play on defense. Between games are The league, Your team and Records. A phone held upright is fine; sideways is the wide view.
On a desktop, click as you would tap. Or use the keys: WASD or the arrows move; J or Space is the big button and K the other one, and carrying the ball J, K, L and the semicolon are Spin, Juke, Hurdle and Dive; 1 to 5 pick a play, Q and E change the tab and Enter is Again; 1 to 4 make a call on their ball; T calls a timeout, H brings How to play back, and Escape pauses and asks whether to leave.
What isn’t settled yet
It is one player: your teammates and the other side are the computer’s. There are no penalties yet. On a phone held sideways, the big button can sit over the right of the play. Your season lives in the browser it’s played in, unless you keep a copy: Save a copy and Open a copy (Settings, between games) keep your season as a file. Clearing the site’s data without one starts it again. There is no gamepad support, the keys can’t be remapped, and it isn’t playable with a screen reader.
Build Log
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Build 20
Every kick is set before it’s kicked now: hold Kick, let go in the green and lean the stick, and an arrow on the field shows the aim. Then the kicker acts it out, running up to the tee or stepping in to the hold, and now and then a field goal or punt is blocked. On kickoffs the receiving side drops back to block. Handoffs and tosses pass from hand to hand, and an interception is yours to run back.
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Build 19
The stadium sounds like one now. Your crowd murmurs between plays, hushes for your snap, gets loud when you’re on defense (chanting on third down) and rises as a pass hangs in the air or a run breaks free. It roars, groans, gasps and applauds as the play deserves. You’ll hear the referee’s whistle, the pads at the snap, the quarterback’s call and every hit, and the music steps back while a play is live. Settings has a Crowd volume of its own.
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Build 18
Running with the ball looks the part now. Spin turns the runner right round, his back to the tackler, and Juke dips a shoulder the wrong way before he leans hard into the cut. Two new moves join them: Hurdle takes him up and over, harder to bring down in the air and clear of a man on the turf, and Dive puts him out flat, down where the ball reaches, a touchdown if it’s over the line.
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Build 17
The crowd is people now, not blocks: fans with heads, hair and caps, some with their arms up, and rows of them painted on the upper decks. The shoulder pads sit on the shoulders, where they had covered the top of the number on every player’s back.
Earlier builds (6)
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Build 16
Each side now has a defense of its own. The same eleven used to play both ways, so a receiver also played corner and Records gave him catches and tackles alike. Now eleven come off and eleven go on when the ball changes hands, with their own names and numbers, and Records splits by who made each play. On their ball you play a man of the defense.
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Build 15
The players are dressed for the game at last: helmets in the team’s colour with a face mask, shoulder pads, and pants to below the knee in place of shorts. The yellow line to gain now shows on the field where the first down is, and steps aside for goal to go and kicks. Your crest sits on the 50, and the light towers glow.
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Build 14
Settings now has Save a copy and Open a copy between games: your season, team and records as a file, to keep safe or to carry to another browser. Opening one asks first and says what the copy holds. With a mouse, the Run call’s card no longer runs past its edge, and a save missing a count no longer shows minus a million passing yards in Records.
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Build 13
The arrow keys, Page Up, Page Down, Home and End now stay in the game. Inside a longer page, Up and Down used to scroll the page and slide the game out of view. Every play’s name now fits its card, where Play-action was cut short. With a punt in the air, the bar under the score says Punt until the whistle. The punter holding the ball is no longer told to hold Throw.
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Build 10
Covering your own kickoff, the teammate you were handed stood where he lined up unless you steered him, with your ring round him, while the other ten ran down the field. Now, with the stick let go, he runs down with them and after the returner, as the computer would, and the stick takes him back whenever you push it.
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Build 8
Practice between games had grown past the studio’s cap. With every part of the team practised, the attack’s effects multiplied out to more than twice their starting strength. They were brought back inside 1.4 times on each side of the ball, so a season’s practice now helps without running away with the game. Practising hands had also turned some broken-up passes into drops; it now only turns a drop or a pick into a catch.
Credits and licences
Built on three.js, used under the MIT licence with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Typefaces are the ones already on your device; nothing is downloaded. Cover drawn from the game’s own field, player and stadium code.
Tight Window is original work by Launchway Games.