oh and when i look at my second instance of pong the ball immediately disappears when it scores a point on web version btw
You are correct, it is a bug. It's actually that the ball is entering it's initialize routine twice, one to launch the ball, and a second time 1 second after launch. This has since been patched, we will be posting a DevLog soon to announce the next update, with a ton of quality of life improvements! :)