On the 26th of July I shipped a fix for a bug in Creature Fishing where, during online play, another player could take control of your character.
Read that again with the important detail attached: there were no other players.
Nobody had this happen to them. Nobody reported it. I found it by opening two browser windows and playing against myself, discovered that window two could seize window one, and spent an evening fixing a griefing exploit for a griefer who does not exist.
My changelog is a list of things that happened to nobody
Once you notice this it is hard to stop noticing. Here is a genuine sample.
| Date | What I fixed |
|---|---|
| Jul 26 | Players clipping through walls |
| Jul 26 | A sea slug that was duplicating itself indefinitely |
| Jul 26 | Another player being able to take control of your character |
| Aug 3 | The main character ignoring prompts entirely |
| Aug 3 | The main character beginning to speak in HTML |
That last one deserves its moment. In 500 Million Years you watch a boy spend eternity alone in an empty space, and for a while there he would occasionally start emitting markup tags mid-sentence, like a man losing his grip on language in a very specific and modern way.
I fixed it. I did keep the part where he sometimes communicates non-verbally, because that one turned out to be better than what I had written on purpose.
Why keep doing this
What I actually miss about the internet I grew up on is not the design. It is that things on it were made by one person for no reason.
Somebody's page about a topic. A text board with fourteen regulars. A small strange thing that existed because its author wanted it to exist, with no growth strategy attached and nothing at the end of it. You clicked a link and you were in, and there was no account, no install, no onboarding, and no ads before the thing you came for.
That is the specification I actually build against. Every game here opens in one click. None of them ask who you are. They save to your own browser and belong to nobody.
The other influence, and I will name it since it shows: Undertale. Not the mechanics, the sense that a small game is allowed to be strange and personal and to have opinions. It gave a lot of us permission.
There is also a hidden board on this site, a Japanese-style horror bulletin board with an original story on it built as a homage to an old net legend. It is not linked from the front page. Finding it is the point of it.
The part I did not expect
I assumed making things nobody plays would feel bad. It mostly does not, and I have thought about why.
Maintenance turns out to be its own reward. Fixing the multiplayer exploit was satisfying because it was invisible. There was no one to thank me and no metric that moved. The game just quietly became correct, and I was the only person in the world who knew.
That is a completely different feeling from shipping something that gets applause, and I am not sure it is worse.
What does get to me, occasionally, is the fishing game. It is the best thing I have made, it has 172 species and an online mode, and its player count is a rounding error. That one stings.
So it stays up
All eight games are still running and I still patch them. The changelog will keep filling up with fixes for problems that have never inconvenienced a living person.
If you clicked through to any of them, you are now one of the few people this applies to, and the wall-clipping bug you will never experience was fixed specifically for you.
All eight games are here. Free, no install, no account.