Why a 20-second browser game is worth making in 2026
Most of the time I spend in a browser tab is not spent playing games — it's waiting. Waiting for a build to finish, for a page to load, for a meeting to start. That dead time is exactly what Catch the Fly is built for, and it's worth saying plainly why I think that's a legitimate thing to design for, rather than a lesser one.
"Simple" and "low-effort" aren't the same thing
It's easy to assume a one-mechanic game took an afternoon to make. In practice, most of the development time on Catch the Fly went into things that don't show up as new features: tuning exactly how much the hover time should shrink per catch so difficulty ramps up smoothly instead of in jarring steps, getting touch input to feel as responsive as a mouse click on mobile, and making sure the layout doesn't break across nine languages of differing text length. None of that is visible in a screenshot. All of it is the actual work.
The appeal of a game with no state to manage
There's also something I like about a game that asks nothing of the player up front. No account, no tutorial, no onboarding flow — you land on the page, and within two clicks you're playing. That's partly a technical choice (no backend means there's nothing to sign up for) and partly a design one: I wanted the gap between "curious" and "playing" to be as close to zero as I could make it.
What I'm not trying to do
Catch the Fly isn't trying to compete with games that ask for an hour of your evening. It's not going to grow a progression system, a shop, or push notifications trying to bring you back. If anything, the goal is closer to the opposite of typical engagement design: be useful for exactly as long as the break lasts, and be just as easy to walk away from.
See the blog index for more, including the technical writeup on how the multi-language interface and sound effects work.