So, this basketball loop thing. I figured it’d be a walk in the park, something to knock out in an afternoon, you know?
I mean, it’s just a ball, a hoop, make it loop. Easy peasy, right? That’s what I told myself. I needed something easy. I was banging my head against the wall on this other, much bigger project, and honestly, I just needed a small victory. Something to prove I could still finish something.
How It All Kicked Off
Yeah, so the grand plan wasn’t even about a basketball loop, not at first. I was trying to build this huge, complicated thing… well, what it was doesn’t really matter, ’cause it was going absolutely nowhere. Every little bit I tried to add just felt like slogging through thick mud. Every idea I had just blew up into this massive headache.
I was starting to feel pretty crummy about the whole deal. You ever get that feeling? Like you’re just running in place, getting nowhere. So, I finally just said, “Alright, forget this, I’m gonna do something super simple. A basketball falling into a hoop. Again and again. A loop. That’s it.” Just wanted to clear my head, really, maybe get a tiny bit of that feeling of progress back.
The “Simple” Loop Journey
Boy, was I wrong about “simple.” First, I just threw a circle and a sort of hoop shape onto my screen. Looked terrible. The ball just kinda… appeared at the top and then blinked into the hoop. No style, no grace, nothing.
Then I figured, okay, it needs a bit of an arc, right? So, I spent a whole evening just messing with numbers, trying to get a curve that didn’t look like a broken line. Tweaking this, adjusting that. Still looked pretty off, kinda jerky.
And then, of course, the ball had to actually hit the rim. Or, at least, look like it. More often than not, in my first tries, it just sailed right through the thing like a ghost. Collision stuff! Who’d have thought a basic loop needed that? Okay, I mean, I kinda knew, but I was really hoping I could just fake it. Nope, no shortcuts there.
I remember thinking about that other big project, the one I was trying to escape from. All its complex bits and pieces. And there I was, stuck on making a ball bounce right. Felt a bit silly, to be honest.
My to-do list for this “simple” thing just kept getting longer:
- Get the ball to fly in a nice curve.
- Make it actually hit the rim sometimes, not just pass through.
- Have it bounce off the backboard if it hit there.
- Get the net to do that little ‘swish’ thing. That alone took ages.
- And then, the big one: making the whole thing loop back to the start without a weird jump or a glitch.
Every single one of those “easy” steps turned into its own little fight. I’d fix one part, and then another part would look weird. The speed, the bounce, just the general “vibe” of it. It was like trying to get an old TV antenna just right, mostly static and a lot of sighing.
This wasn’t some massive company project with teams and complicated tools, you know, like those places trying to juggle a dozen different systems. This was just me, in my own space, wrestling with a digital basketball. But that whole feeling of things being way more tangled up than you first think? Yeah, I definitely got a big dose of that.
Eventually, I nailed it. Or, well, got it working. A ball, making an arc, hitting the net, and looping back. It’s not going to blow anyone’s mind. It’s really just a basketball loop. But when I look at it now, it’s more than just that. It’s a bit of a reminder that even the things you think are “simple” can end up teaching you a lot. Mostly, they teach you to be patient. And that sometimes, the side tracks are where you stumble onto something useful, even if it wasn’t what you were looking for.
So, that’s my story of the “simple” basketball loop. It definitely took more than one afternoon, I can tell you that much.