Story

Hello HN, I made a simple web app for drawing up plays for amateur sports coaches: https://playmaker.click/playbook

It's inspired by Excalidraw; I love how you can hit buttons and go into different modes so I tried to replicate that for desktop users. It should work nicely on tablets, phones not so much.

The main motivation was to learn some Rust and WebAssembly, the recent WASM 64-bit address space update is interesting to me, so I put together a lttle playbook engine that handles player movement, trail recording, and ball possession tracking. It runs the animation/interpolation stuff in the browser.

The rest of the stack is Laravel/Vue on the frontend, Tailwind for styling. Nothing too fancy. I wanted something where I could drag players around, record movements, and play them back like a little animation (double tap outside the field). Supports football (soccer), basketball, rugby, and hockey fields, reasonably badly drawn

There's rough edges for sure; the Rust code could probably be cleaner, I got a bit of help from Claude but where applicable I dug down into the reasoning as to "why", so it was a good learning experience figuring out how to expose structs to JS via wasm-bindgen and learning about serde.

The playbook all runs locally in the browser, and saves the play config into the URL using LZ-String so it can be easily shared without blowing browser URL address bar limits, but I haven't tested silly-big plays on it yet.

Happy to answer any questions about the setup or my approach in general. Cheers! PG