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.
Stay up to date
One short post each week — a new game, a measurement we published, or something we unlearned along the way.
Our games
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
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
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
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
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:
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No clock pressure. No countdown timers, no stamina meters, no
“come back in four hours” gates. A game that needs your attention urgently is
borrowing it. Not earning it.
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Failure is a full stop, not a punishment. Losing ends the run.
It does not take resources away, does not show a defeat screen longer than a second,
and never asks you to watch anything to continue.
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The touch has to feel right. Most of our development time goes into
things players never consciously notice: how long a piece keeps moving after it lands,
how far a merge bounces, whether a sound sits in key with the one before it.
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Readable at a glance. If two pieces look alike but behave differently,
the player is being asked to memorise instead of to see. We stopped trusting our own
eyes on this one, and now measure colour separation as a number.
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
The palette we liked measured ΔE00 = 3.2 between tiers. Measuring the rendered
colour rather than the design swatch is what caught it.
Gravity, restitution, friction and damping: the constants that decide whether a
physics game feels like stone or like rubber.
We made the game play itself headlessly, and it killed a mechanic we had already
convinced ourselves was good.
We simulated games of real physics to check whether a combo mechanic rewards
skill or luck. The answer changed what we shipped.
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