Games that fit in a browser tab

Bysoft Games is a small independent studio. We build short, tactile browser games, the kind you open for five minutes and close feeling a little calmer than before. No downloads. No accounts. No waiting for an energy bar to refill.

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One short post each week — a new game, a measurement we published, or something we unlearned along the way.

Our games

Pebble Merge

Drop rough stones into a jar. Two of the same kind fuse into a smoother, larger one. Sand into clay, clay into moss, on up to cut gemstones. Stack too high and the run ends, so deciding where each piece goes is the entire craft.

It runs on real physics rather than a grid, which means pebbles roll, wedge and settle the way solid objects actually do instead of snapping into cells. Higher tiers render as faceted gems with hard edges. That part took us longer than the physics did.

Play Pebble Merge

Same Seed

Twelve plots. Twelve days. Three actions a day. Plant flowers, keep them watered, and cut them while they still fetch full price, because a bloom starts losing value two days after it opens. Soil matters more than it looks: the wrong ground grows a flower at 0.70 speed, and over nine days that is not a penalty, it is a wasted plot.

Everyone playing on a given day gets the same garden, weather included, so each day carries its own global board and the number you post is measured against everyone else's gardening rather than against your own history. Four minutes. Then tomorrow is a different garden.

Play Same Seed

Daily Sokoban

Push every crate onto its spot. Crates only move when pushed and never when pulled, so one careless move into a corner can end the level four moves in. Undo and redo are unlimited, and a warning fires while a misplaced crate is still recoverable.

Each level is scored twice — pushes and steps — and the two disagree more often than you would expect, so a tidy run and a lazy one each earn a star. One warehouse is served per day from the date; the rest of the set stays open.

Play Daily Sokoban

Clarify

Six jars, several colours, and one rule: pour the top layer of one jar into another, only if the destination has room and the liquid matches — or the jar is empty. Heavy liquid sinks through light, so a careless pour can bury a colour out of reach.

No timer, no random element, and every move is reversible, so the puzzle is about finding the order rather than reflexes. Three stars for clearing in par moves or fewer, fewer pourings worth more. One puzzle is served per day from the date.

Play Clarify

Half Slack

Ninety seconds, one button, one office. Tap to duck into work when the boss's gaze lands on you, tap again to drift back to slacking the moment it moves on. Slack pose pays a rising multiplier, so the longer you get away with it the more the run is worth — and the harder the fall when you mistime a flip.

Everyone gets the same patrol route on a given day, so the board is a fair fight. Catching the flip in the last instant before the gaze arrives pays a bonus, which turns the whole game into a game of margins: not whether you can switch, but how late you dare to.

Play Half Slack

What we mean by “cozy”

“Cozy” has become a marketing word, so we should be specific about what we actually design for. Four rules shape every game we ship:

How we build

Our games are plain web technology: canvas, Web Audio, and a small physics engine, served as static files from an edge network. A game loads in under a second on a phone that has never heard of it, and there is no account to create.

There is one place where we do run a server, and it is the daily board. It receives the moves you made. Nothing else. No name you typed, no email, no cookies set by us. We replay those moves through the same game code to confirm the score is real and then keep it against a random id that never leaves your own browser, which is also why we can show you your rank without ever knowing who you are. Scores from the other modes stay local.

We try to publish the reasoning behind our decisions, including the ones that did not work out. Before adding a combo bonus to Pebble Merge we simulated thousands of games and found that the obvious version of the mechanic rewarded sloppy play more than careful play. So we shipped a much smaller version. That one stung a bit. The analysis is written up here.

From the blog

Eleven stones, one glance

The palette we liked measured ΔE00 = 3.2 between tiers. Measuring the rendered colour rather than the design swatch is what caught it.

Eight numbers, no jitter

Gravity, restitution, friction and damping: the constants that decide whether a physics game feels like stone or like rubber.

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