Hoop Shot is a basketball physics game played against a shot clock rather than an opponent. Drag back from the ball and let go — it launches opposite your drag direction, like pulling back a slingshot, with the length of the drag setting power and the angle setting the arc. A dotted preview line traces the exact trajectory the ball will fly, calculated with the same gravity and speed the shot actually uses once released, so what you see before you let go is genuinely what you get.
Mobile: touch anywhere on the screen, drag away from the ball to set angle and power together, and release to shoot — there's no separate aim step, the whole gesture is one motion. Desktop: drag with the mouse the same way, or skip the mouse entirely and use ←/→ to aim, ↑/↓ to set power, and Space to release the shot. P or Escape pauses mid-run, and M mutes sound without interrupting the clock.
A shot that drops straight through the net without touching the rim at all is a swish, worth 3 base points; one that clips or rattles off the rim before going in still counts as a make but is worth 2. Either kind of make builds a streak, and consecutive baskets — swish or bank, it doesn't matter which — apply a multiplier to your points that climbs with every make up to a cap of 10×. That means a long run of makes back to back is worth dramatically more than the same total number of baskets made in scattered isolated attempts, so once a streak is running it's worth protecting even at the cost of a slightly safer, less ambitious shot. Missing resets the streak to zero but doesn't cost you points beyond that reset, and the shot immediately after a miss is exactly as valuable as any other first shot.
You start each run with 60 seconds on the shot clock, and every basket buys real time back onto it — 3 seconds for a swish, 2 for a bank shot. Because makes replenish the clock faster than the average shot attempt eats into it, a genuinely good run can extend itself for a long stretch, and the game only actually ends once your misses start outpacing your makes. The hoop doesn't stay still either: it relocates to a new spot on the court after every single attempt, make or miss, and once you've sunk a handful of shots it also starts drifting side to side while you're aiming, adding a moving-target element on top of the base distance-and-angle problem.
High, arcing shots carry a much bigger margin for error than flat, line-drive ones, because the ball crosses the plane of the rim closer to vertical on a steep arc — and the basket only registers a make on a downward crossing through the hoop, so a flatter shot that's even slightly off line is far more likely to clip the rim wrong or sail past it entirely. It's also worth noting that the rim's two ends are solid rather than purely decorative: a shot that catches one produces a real physics bounce, and you can use that on purpose to bank an otherwise awkward angle in off the edge rather than only relying on clean swishes. Because the hoop relocates after every attempt, resist the temptation to reuse your previous drag distance from memory — recalibrate the drag fresh each time against the new distance, especially once the hoop starts sliding and the target itself is moving as you pull back.
The touch drag-and-release control was built as the primary way to play, and it maps naturally to a slingshot motion with your thumb, which is why it works the same way on desktop as a mouse drag rather than being a separate "mobile mode." The keyboard alternative on desktop — arrows to aim and power, Space to fire — exists mainly for players who prefer discrete, repeatable inputs over a freehand drag, and it can actually be more precise for lining up a specific angle since each key press nudges the aim by a small fixed amount rather than depending on exactly how far or straight you drag.