Devlog

Notes from building fourteen browser games on my own — what shipped, what broke, and what I got wrong before I got it right. Mostly the last one. If you're building something similar, the mistakes are probably the useful part.

• 13 August 2026

  The page that had eight words

  Our biggest game shipped with a page containing eight words of text, and nobody noticed for nine days, because the game itself worked perfectly. How a fourteenth game slipped past a fix applied to thirteen — and the pipeline check that stops it recurring.

• 4 August 2026

  Strata: how a small mining game became 1,400 metres deep

  It started as a vertical slice about the feel of digging. Each fix made the next limitation obvious, until it became the only game here that saves your progress and rebuilds its world every Monday — including the moment we made it so deep it broke.

• 4 August 2026

  The site speaks Icelandic now

  Adding a second language is a morning's work. Adding one a search engine can find is a different job — and when a translation silently stops matching, nothing breaks and nobody notices. The one log line that is our entire safety net.

• 3 August 2026

  The number that decides whether a track is fair

  Two constants stop Redline's generator producing deaths the player couldn't avoid: the minimum gap between hazards, and how far back you respawn. Both were found by being killed by our own game and being unable to say what we should have done.

• 3 August 2026

  Testing a game with no browser

  Ninety lines of fake canvas let a game run its whole simulation in Node with no display anywhere. It immediately found two crashes that killed the game on the second frame — which we'd been staring at, assuming it was the environment.

• 31 July 2026

  Writing thirteen game pages in one sitting

  Every game here was a canvas and nothing else. Writing a real page for each was supposed to be an SEO chore; it turned into the most useful design review we've done — and it taught us the cost of using the same template thirteen times.

• 14 July 2026

  Two games in one day

  Sonar and Tether went from nothing to playable on the same day. Not a boast about speed — what happens when a game is allowed to be exactly one idea, and an honest account of what shipping in a day doesn't buy you.

• 6 July 2026

  We moved every game off its own subdomain

  Consolidating eleven subdomains onto paths was the right call for reasons we understood — and it completely failed to fix the thing we did it for. A lesson about choosing the interesting explanation over the boring, correct one.