Not the Basketball Association
Remember when sports games came in a big cardboard box, and the court was made of chunky pixels? Yeah. We missed that too.
NtBA is an open-source basketball game in the spirit of the late-80s home-computer classics.
Sideline view for the fast break, end-on view when you attack the hoop.
- Choose VS CPU.
- Pick a level (Novice, Pro or All-Star) and your side (Home or Away).
- Press Start. Both key sets steer your player.
- Choose Online.
- Press Challenge next to a player. They get 30 seconds to Accept or Decline.
- Accepted? Tip-off.
| Home (gold) | Away (green) | Action |
|---|---|---|
| WASD | Arrow keys | Run |
| X | K | Shoot (on defense: swipe for a steal or jump to block) |
| Z | J | Pass (hold a direction to pick your target) |
| C | L | Switch to the teammate nearest the ball |
| M | M | Sound on / off |
| B | B | Colour-blind mode on / off (away team wears blue instead of green) |
Run into the ball handler to strip the ball. Against the CPU or online, you control one team and either key set works. Sound starts off; turn it on with M or the Sound button under the screen at any time.
- 🏀 Five-on-five against the computer, on one keyboard or across two computers
- 🤖 A CPU opponent at three levels: Novice, Pro and All-Star
- 🛡️ Real defense: strips, steals, blocks, jumped passing lanes
- 🎥 Two camera angles that switch with the action
- 🎯 Risk/reward shooting: long shots are riskier, threes are worth the gamble
- 🏟️ Crowd, benches, refs and a glowing scoreboard
- 🔊 C64-style chip sound effects (off until you turn them on)
Early days. It's a playable prototype.
Rust compiled to WebAssembly, with a plain JS front end (no framework, no bundler).
make serve # builds web/ntba.wasm and serves http://localhost:8080
make check # fmt, clippy, tests, wasm build: everything CI runsYou'll need a Rust toolchain (rustup picks up the pinned one and the wasm32 target
automatically) and Python 3 for the tiny dev server. There's also a flake.nix if you're a Nix person.
Not sure how to help? Every open issue is sized for one pull request, so you can hand one to an AI coding agent. If you don't know where to start, paste this prompt into your agent:
You are helping with NtBA ("Not the Basketball Association"), an open-source retro basketball game
written in Rust (compiled to WebAssembly) with a plain JavaScript front end.
Repository: https://github.com/EyalRo/NtBA
1. Read README.md, wiki/Architecture.md, and wiki/Online-Play.md before touching code.
2. Pick ONE open issue from https://github.com/EyalRo/NtBA/issues. Each is sized for a single pull
request. Issues titled "Tracking: ..." are lists, not tasks: open them and take one of the
issues they link. Prefer the label "good first issue", and skip any issue whose "Depends on"
issues are still open. If I tell you my interest (game rules, bot AI, web UI, graphics, sound,
networking), pick from that area. Say which issue you picked and why before you start.
3. Work on a new branch and change only what that issue asks for. Its "Out of scope" section is a
hard limit.
4. Follow these project rules:
- Determinism: the simulation must give bit-identical results on every machine. In
crates/ntba-core/src/game.rs, use only + - * / and sqrt on f32, never read a clock, and use only
the seeded RNG already in Game. Anything that affects the simulation goes into
Game::state_hash(). If a change legitimately alters the pinned cross-build hash in
crates/ntba-core/src/replay.rs, re-pin it and explain why in the PR.
- ntba-core has no dependencies. Keep it that way.
- Art, sound, and text must be original. Never copy or trace commercial games, and use only
fictional teams and players.
- Never commit secrets or credentials.
- Documentation lives in wiki/ (it is published to the GitHub wiki). Don't add new markdown files
elsewhere.
- Don't change the wire protocol or the wasm exports unless the issue says to; if you must,
say so clearly in the PR.
5. Before opening the PR, run `make check`. If you touched crates/ntba-core, ntba-net or ntba-wasm,
also run `make determinism`; for signaling changes run `cd signaling && npm test`.
Report the real results. If something fails, say so and why; don't hide it.
6. Open a pull request whose description starts with "Closes #<issue number>", lists what you
verified, and includes screenshots for anything visual. Keep it small and focused.
If something is unclear, ask me one short question instead of guessing.
NtBA is an independent fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by any league, team, or player.
Released under the GPL-3.0-or-later. Go sink one. 🏀