About Alftanet
Fourteen original browser games, built by one person, free to play and paid for by ads. No app store, no downloads, no accounts. This page explains who makes them, how they're made, and how the whole thing is funded.
What this site is
Alftanet is a small, independent games project. Every game here runs entirely in your web browser — you click a link and you're playing within a couple of seconds, on whatever device you happen to be holding. There is nothing to install, nothing to sign up for, and no launcher between you and the game.
The games are short. Most runs last between two and ten minutes, and they're built for the kind of session where you have a few minutes and want one more go. A couple of them — Strata and Castaway — are deliberately longer, because some ideas need room. Everything else is designed to be picked up and put down.
Who makes them
One person. I write the code, draw the art, compose the music, run the servers and write everything you read on this site, including this page. There is no studio and no team, which is why the writing here says "I" rather than "we" when it's being honest.
I grew up on arcade games, and this project started because I wanted to make the kind of quick, honest, pick-up-and-play titles that feel increasingly rare — games that don't ask you for an account, don't interrupt themselves to sell you something, and don't need thirty minutes of tutorial before they get good.
It's a hobby rather than a business. That shapes a lot of what follows.
How the games are made
From scratch, without a game engine. Each game is plain JavaScript drawing into a
<canvas> element, which is a deliberately low-level way to work and gives
complete control over how everything feels. The one exception is Strata, which is large
enough to justify a framework.
Most of the games ship with no audio files at all. The music and sound effects are generated in the browser at runtime using the Web Audio API — oscillators, filters and envelopes wired together in code. That keeps the games tiny and fast to load, and it means the soundtrack can respond to what's actually happening: in Strata the score shifts key as you descend through the strata.
If you're curious about the details, the devlog covers how specific things were built and what broke along the way, and the guides go deeper on the design and engineering ideas behind them.
Originals and tributes
Some of these games are modern takes on classics — a missile-defence game in the spirit of Missile Command, a physics-driven spin on Asteroids, a modernised Snake. Others are original ideas built around a single mechanic: a grapple-swing game, an echo-location dive, a one-tap tower builder.
Where a game is a tribute, I say so plainly and name what it's a tribute to. What gets borrowed is the rule — the idea that made the original good. The artwork, the code, the music and the level design are always new work. Nothing here is a port, a reskin or an emulation of anyone else's game.
How this is paid for
Advertising, and nothing else. There are no purchases, no premium tier, no subscription and nothing locked behind a payment. Every game is complete and free, and will stay that way.
I'd rather say that plainly than bury it. Ads pay for the domain, the servers and the certificates, which is the entire running cost of the site. If you're using an ad blocker, that's your call and the games will work exactly the same.
What the site does not do: it doesn't require an account, doesn't ask for your email, doesn't sell anything, and doesn't sell your data. Leaderboard entries are a display name and a score — nothing else — and analytics are cookieless and aggregate. The privacy policy spells out exactly what is collected.
What I'm still getting wrong
Plenty. The most current example is accessibility: I audited all fourteen games recently and found that only one of them honours the system's reduced-motion setting, and that none offer colour-blind-friendly palettes. That audit is published in full, failures included, along with what I'm changing.
If something on this site is broken, unfair, or hard to play for any reason, I'd genuinely like to know — there's a review box in every game, or you can get in touch directly.