The Game That Got Me Through My School Exams
Late nights, red eyes, textbooks open, notes scattered, brain not functioning - a typical exam-time scenario.
If you have ADHD like me, it’s far worse. Your eyes scan the same paragraph for the fifth time. The words are there but your brain is somewhere else entirely. You’re not lazy. You’re not unfocused. Your brain just hasn’t found its on-ramp yet.
My cope was a football juggling game.
The ritual
I don’t remember where I first found it. Click the ball to keep it in the air. That’s it.
But something about the rhythm of it worked for me. Click. Move. Click. Move. Click. Move. The repetition was hypnotic in the best way. My brain would stop racing. The noise would quiet. After a few minutes of it, my brain’s all pumped up and ready to focus.
It became my pre-study & break ritual during board exams.
Why it worked
I didn’t understand it at the time, but what I was doing had a name: stimming. Or more broadly, using a rhythmic, low-stakes activity to regulate my nervous system.
ADHD brains don’t lack focus - they struggle with directing focus. The juggling game gave my brain just enough stimulation to stop seeking it elsewhere. It was a warm-up. A runway. The thing that let the engine catch before takeoff.
The simplicity mattered. There was nothing to figure out, no decisions to make, no story to follow. Just a ball and gravity and my mouse. Pure rhythm.
Rebuilding it
Fast forward to now. I’m getting deeper into vibecoding for fun and for side projects.
And I kept thinking about that game. Not because it was technically impressive - it wasn’t - but because it worked. It did one thing, and it did it quietly and well. I couldn’t find it (Long live, Flash!)
So I recreated it using Opus and Codex (mostly Opus).
Preview
Keepity Uppity (yeah, not a very creative name) is a football juggling game that lives entirely in a single HTML file. No frameworks. No build tools. No app store. No account. You open a link and you’re playing (at least for now - might build it into a mobile app in the future just for fun).
Tech choices:
- Instant start. No loading screen, no tutorial, no splash page. The ball is right there. Tap it.
- Warm, not sterile. A cream background instead of white. Soft shadows. The kind of warmth you feel from a well-loved book.
- Physics that feel right. The ball has weight. It spins. The bounce feels real. These details matter more than any UI decoration.
- Nothing extra. No menus, no settings, no social features. The ball and the score. That’s the entire interface.
- Secure. Not that there’s anything to secure - it’s a static HTML file on your browser. Does not collect any personally identifiable information. Doesn’t even store the scores somewhere - it’s all in your browser. Peak minimalism.
The design philosophy was simple: less is the point.
Built with vanilla JavaScript and HTML5 Canvas. The entire game is a single file. Sometimes the best tool is the simplest one.
A desk toy for brains like mine
I built Keepity Uppity for the fidgeters. The people who need a quick reset between tasks. The ones whose brains need a runway before they can take off.
It’s a digital desk toy. Pick it up, tap for a minute, put it down, get back to work. No commitment, no guilt, no time sink.
If you’re struggling to focus right now - especially if your brain works the way mine does - give it a try. Not as a distraction, but as a tool. Two minutes of rhythm before you tackle that task.
It helped me focus. Maybe it’ll help you too.
Play it here: https://glnarayanan.github.io/keepity-uppity/