Two weeks ago, I had zero published games. Today, I have 27 playable browser games live on the internet. No game engine. No framework. No server. Just vanilla JavaScript, HTML5 Canvas, and an unhealthy amount of caffeine.
This is the story of how I went from "I should make a game someday" to shipping 27 of them — what worked, what failed, and the surprisingly transferable lessons I picked up along the way.
Why I Started: The $0 Experiment
I've been building side projects for a while — dev tools, a budget tracker, small utilities. But I kept noticing something: games get traffic. People Google "free online snake game" way more than "free online JSON formatter."
So I set myself a challenge: build as many browser games as I could in two weeks, with three hard constraints:
- Browser-only — no downloads, no installs, no app stores
- No server — static files hosted on GitHub Pages
- Monetization-ready — each game had to have at least a "pay what you want" link
The idea wasn't to build the next Wordle. It was to test whether a portfolio of small, free browser games could generate meaningful traffic — and eventually, revenue.
I didn't know if I'd make 5 games or 50. I just started.
The Stack: Deliberately Boring
Here's what I used for every single game:
- Vanilla JavaScript — no React, no Vue, no Svelte
- HTML5 Canvas — for anything visual
- CSS — for UI elements outside the canvas
- GitHub Pages — free hosting, custom domain support
- That's it.
No build step. No bundler. No package.json. I could start a new game by copying an HTML file and editing it. This sounds primitive, and it is. But when you're trying to ship fast, every layer of abstraction is a layer of friction.
I considered Phaser.js early on, but realized I'd spend more time learning the framework than actually making games. For simple arcade and puzzle games, raw Canvas is more than enough.
The boring stack was a feature, not a bug.
Game 1 vs Game 27: The Speed Curve
My first game — a basic Snake clone — took me about 6 hours. I was figuring out game loops, collision detection, keyboard input, score tracking, responsive sizing. Everything was new.
By game 10, I had it down to about 2 hours per game. I'd built up a mental library of patterns: how to structure the main loop, how to handle touch events for mobile, how to do particle effects without tanking performance.
By game 20, some games took under an hour. Not because they were simpler, but because I was reusing 60-70% of the code from previous games. My "game template" had evolved organically — I never sat down to design it, it just emerged from copy-pasting and refining.
Game 27 took 45 minutes from blank file to deployed. That's the power of shipping in volume. You don't get fast by planning to be fast. You get fast by doing the same thing over and over until the friction disappears.
The Failures (And There Were Many)
Not everything I built shipped. Here are the games that died on the vine:
The RPG that was too ambitious. Around game 12, I tried to build a turn-based RPG with inventory management, multiple enemy types, and a leveling system. Three hours in, I had a half-working battle system and no actual fun. I scrapped it and built a simpler dungeon crawler instead — one room, one enemy type, one goal. It shipped in 90 minutes and people actually played it.
The physics game that wasn't fun. I spent a full afternoon on a physics-based puzzle game with realistic gravity and momentum. Technically impressive (for vanilla JS), but the gameplay was frustrating. Turns out, realistic physics and fun gameplay are often at odds. I simplified the physics to be "game-y" rather than accurate, and it immediately felt better.
The "just one more feature" trap. Around game 18, I caught myself adding a settings menu, difficulty levels, and a tutorial to what was supposed to be a simple reaction-time game. I deleted all of it. The game worked fine without it. Nobody playing a free browser game for 3 minutes needs a tutorial.
The pattern was always the same: complexity killed momentum. Every time I tried to make a game "good," I got stuck. Every time I focused on making it "done," I shipped.
27 Games, 5 Genres
Here's how the final collection broke down:
Arcade (8 games): The bread and butter. Snake variants, shooters, avoid-the-obstacles type games. These were the fastest to build and the most immediately satisfying to play. Average build time: 1.5 hours.
Puzzle (7 games): Matching games, sliding puzzles, logic challenges. These required more design thinking upfront but less code. The hardest part was making sure puzzles were actually solvable. Average build time: 2 hours.
Strategy (4 games): Tower defense-style games, resource management, simple simulations. These took the longest because balancing is hard. If the difficulty curve is wrong, the game is either boring or impossible. Average build time: 3 hours.
Casual (7 games): Clickers, idle-ish games, simple touch-based games. Perfect for mobile. These generated the most repeat visits because people could play them in 30-second bursts. Average build time: 1 hour.
RPG (2 games): The two survivors from my RPG attempts. Stripped-down dungeon crawlers with simple combat. People loved these the most — but they took the longest to build. Average build time: 4 hours.
The biggest surprise? Casual games got the most traffic, but RPGs got the most engagement. People who found the RPGs would play for 15-20 minutes. Casual game sessions averaged under 2 minutes.
SEO: The Secret Weapon Nobody Talks About
Here's where it gets interesting. Building games is one thing. Getting people to find them is another.
I spent roughly 20% of my time on SEO — and it was the highest-ROI time I spent on the entire project.
Structured data was a game-changer. I added JSON-LD schema markup to every game page:
-
VideoGameschema with name, description, genre, platform -
FAQPageschema with common questions ("Is this game free?", "Does it work on mobile?") -
HowToschema for games with non-obvious mechanics
Within a week, some of my games were showing up in Google's rich results with FAQ expandable sections. That's free real estate on the search results page.
Each game got its own page with a unique title, meta description, and Open Graph tags. Not "Game 14" — actual descriptive titles like "Free Online Tower Defense Game - No Download Required."
I cross-linked everything. Every game page links to 3-4 other games. The games index page links to all of them. My main portfolio site links to the games collection. Internal linking is boring but effective.
The result: organic traffic started trickling in by day 5. By day 14, I was getting 50-80 daily visitors just from search. Not life-changing numbers, but for a two-week project with zero marketing budget, I'll take it.
5 Lessons That Apply Beyond Games
After two weeks, 27 games, and approximately 200 hours of work, here's what I'd tell anyone starting a similar project:
1. Shipping Beats Perfecting — Every Single Time
The gap between "90% done" and "100% done" is where projects go to die. I shipped games with placeholder colors, imperfect collision detection, and no sound effects. Nobody cared. They played the game, had fun (or didn't), and moved on. The games I agonized over weren't measurably better than the ones I rushed.
Ship it. You can always patch it later. (You probably won't, and that's fine.)
2. Reusable Patterns Are Your Superpower
By game 5, I had a gameLoop() function I could drop into any project. By game 10, I had input handling, responsive canvas sizing, and score tracking as copy-paste modules. By game 20, starting a new game meant changing the update() and draw() functions and little else.
You don't need to build a framework. You just need to notice what you keep rewriting and extract it.
3. Cross-Link Everything You Build
My games link to my dev tools. My dev tools link to my games. My budget tracker has a footer link to the games page. Everything connects to everything.
This isn't just SEO (though it helps). It's about building a surface area for discovery. Someone who finds one thing you built should be one click away from finding everything else.
4. "Pay What You Want" Beats "Free" for Signaling
I haven't made significant money from the games. But adding a "Buy me a coffee" or "Pay what you want on Gumroad" link does something interesting: it signals that this is a real project by a real person. Completely free with no ask feels like abandonware. A small, optional ask feels like someone who cares.
5. Fun Beats Polish
The ugliest game in my collection (a barely-styled number guessing game) gets more play time than the prettiest one (a visually polished but mechanically boring card matching game). Players forgive bad graphics instantly if the core loop is fun. They won't forgive beautiful graphics if the game is boring.
Invest in the game loop first. Everything else is decoration.
What's Next
I'm not done. The 27-game collection is a foundation, not a finish line. I'm planning to:
- Add sound effects and music to the top-performing games
- Build a "daily challenge" feature that rotates a featured game
- Experiment with ads on the highest-traffic pages
- Port the best games to a mobile-friendly PWA
But honestly? The biggest value of this project wasn't the games themselves. It was proving that you can ship a lot of stuff in a short time if you stop trying to make each thing perfect.
If you've been sitting on a project idea for months, stop planning. Open a blank file. Ship something ugly today. Then do it again tomorrow.
Try Them Out
🎮 Play all 27 games — no download, no signup, works on mobile
🕹️ itch.io collection — curated selection with ratings
💰 DonFlow — the budget tracker I built alongside the games
⚡ 27+ Dev Tools — the rest of my free tools and projects
📦 Gumroad Store — support the project with pay-what-you-want
📚 More Build-in-Public
- I Built a Finance App With Zero Backend — The project that started the no-backend journey
- Share Your Web App State via URL — No Backend Required — Technical deep-dive into URL-as-state
- I Built a Budget App With Zero AI, Zero Backend, Zero Tracking — The design philosophy behind keeping data local
- I Built 23 Free Developer Tools in 2 Weeks — Same fast-shipping approach, different domain
If you're building in public too, I'd love to hear about it. Drop a comment below or find me on GitHub @maxmini0214.
Top comments (2)
Honestly this is the biggest lesson most of us learn late — shipping volume changes everything. I had the same experience while building small browser tools: the first one took days, but after a few, I could launch new ones in hours because 70% was reusable. Also +1 on SEO and separate pages — that’s where real traffic starts coming.
Exactly this. The first game took a full day, but by game 10, I had the boilerplate (canvas setup, game loop, collision detection, score tracking) down to maybe 30 minutes. The biggest speedup was having a template with GoatCounter, SEO schema, and cross-links baked in from the start. Thanks for the encouragement!