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.
One short post each week — a new game, a measurement we published, or something we unlearned along the way.
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.
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.
“Cozy” has become a marketing word, so we should be specific about what we actually design for. Four rules shape every game we ship:
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.
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.