Creating games to make the web fun again

What happens when you build a game with one million checkboxes? It becomes a viral social experiment celebrating the creative, chaotic spirit of the early internet.

#1about 2 minutes

Reviving the playful and creative spirit of the early internet

The internet has lost the playful, experimental nature of early Flash games, which inspired the creation of quirky browser-based experiences.

#2about 1 minute

Finding a creative niche in unconventional game design

Moving from creating standard games to more bizarre concepts resulted in more personal enjoyment and better audience reception.

#3about 3 minutes

Prioritizing creative freedom over monetization in projects

Quitting a finance job to rediscover a love for programming led to creating games for fun, intentionally avoiding ads to preserve their purity.

#4about 4 minutes

Discovering a hidden community in a game's binary data

A surprising discovery revealed that players were manipulating the game's binary data to embed a URL, leading to a hidden Discord community.

#5about 2 minutes

How users created bots to draw collaborative pixel art

Players reverse-engineered the game's API to build bots that could draw images and fight for territory, creating emergent, collaborative gameplay.

#6about 7 minutes

Learning new technologies by building unconventional games

The creative process involves finding an interesting technical feature in an existing platform and pushing its limits to build a game in an unexpected place.

#7about 4 minutes

Finding community support for niche development challenges

Solving unusual technical problems often requires tapping into developer communities, as the issues are too specific for standard documentation or AI.

#8about 3 minutes

Balancing creative passion with the pressure to monetize

The decision to monetize is weighed against the enjoyment of the creative process, with the option of returning to a traditional job serving as a baseline.

#9about 5 minutes

Managing the costs and lifecycle of a viral project

Self-hosting on a provider with sane bandwidth pricing and embracing a project's temporary nature are key strategies for managing the costs of viral traffic.

#10about 6 minutes

The challenges of donations and subscription models for creators

Donation platforms have high friction, while subscription models can lead to audience capture, where creators feel obligated to produce specific content.

#11about 3 minutes