About Catch the Fly

Why I made this

I wanted a break-time game that respects the fact that a break is short. Most browser games either need a few minutes to make sense, or they're so simple they're not fun after round one. Catch the Fly tries to sit in between: the rule fits in one sentence — tap the fly before it moves — but the difficulty scales with you, because every catch shaves a little time off how long the fly sits still. Play for ten seconds or ten minutes; the game doesn't mind either way.

How it's built

There's no game engine, no build step, and no framework under the hood. It's plain HTML for the layout, CSS for the two visual themes (a hand-drawn "Classic" sketch style and a flatter "Modern" icon style, each with a light and dark palette), and vanilla JavaScript for the game loop and the settings. The fly itself is a small SVG path in Classic mode, or an emoji in Modern mode — nothing is downloaded from a server while you play.

The sound effects are a good example of that "nothing downloaded" approach: instead of shipping audio files, the buzzing and the swat sound are generated on the fly (pun intended) using the Web Audio API — a couple of oscillators and a short burst of filtered noise, synthesized in your browser the moment they're needed.

Your record, language choice, theme, and sound preference are stored with localStorage, which is why they're still there the next time you visit on the same device and browser, even though nothing is ever sent to a server. Details on exactly what's stored and why are in the Privacy Policy.

Why nine languages

The interface (menus, buttons, the legal text) is translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Romanian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Chinese. I did the translations myself, section by section, rather than running the whole thing through one pass of machine translation — partly for accuracy, and partly because it forced me to notice UI text that was awkward or unclear in the original English version too.

Who's behind it

Catch the Fly is a one-person hobby project — I write, design, and maintain it myself, without a studio or a company behind it. If something breaks, if a translation reads oddly, or if you have an idea for a setting you wish existed, email catchtheflygame@protonmail.com. I'd genuinely like to hear it.

What's next

Ideas on the list: a couple of alternate targets besides the fly, a short "daily challenge" mode with a fixed seed so scores are comparable between players, and a way to see your score history rather than just your single best run. None of it is committed to a timeline — this stays a side project I work on when I have a free evening — but it's where things are headed. I'll write about progress on the blog as it happens.