A game can look correct until the player presses Restart. That button is one of the fastest ways to expose hidden state.
In a small browser game, I treat restart as a full lifecycle test rather than a visual reset.
What restart should clear
A restart should create a fresh run:
- player position and health;
- score and collected items;
- enemy timers and active projectiles;
- win and lose flags;
- keyboard and pointer listeners;
- pending animation and timeout callbacks.
Resetting only the score is not enough if an old enemy loop is still running.
A simple failure pattern
A common implementation keeps game objects in module-level variables and starts a new animation loop on every restart. The first run works. After two restarts, movement feels faster, collisions fire twice, and the result becomes inconsistent.
The bug is not in the button label. It is in ownership of the running state.
Make the lifecycle explicit
I prefer a small state machine: loading → playing → won/lost → restarting.
The transition into restarting should stop the current loop, remove listeners, cancel timers, and create a new run context. The new context then owns its entities and callbacks.
Test the failure path first
I run this sequence several times:
- Start a fresh game.
- Lose intentionally.
- Restart.
- Win or lose again.
- Refresh the page and repeat.
If the second run differs from the first without a design reason, I inspect duplicated listeners, stale references, and callbacks that still point at the previous run.
The practical lesson
Restart is more than a convenience button. It is a compact test of whether the game has a coherent lifecycle. When restart is reliable, win, lose, refresh, and replay are usually easier to reason about as well.
Top comments (0)