Lofi and Games

The last game I made was sudoku but the implementation was not the best. The generated games were not unique, and it was always hard, regardless of the difficulty 😅.

I decided to post it on Reddit to get some feedback; What a terrible mistake. Anonymous people are just too toxic. Anyways, I made some modifications and generated 2.500 games with unique solutions and correct difficulty. It took me just 1-2 hours. After that, I added a feature to hover and click on notes, just like the NY Times sudoku game.

I'm going to improve it more next week, add the missing features and generate more games.

In the meantime, I made a 2048 game and published it on the site. It was not hard to implement, I just copied the tile slide puzzle game and modified it to work like the 2048 game.

Now that we have some lofi music, it was time to add beautiful art in the background.

I spent a few days remaking the homepage. Finding good pictures that would fit the site aesthetic was the hardest part.

I found an incredible artist on DeviantArt, picked up a few images, and sent an email asking permission to use them. But it's been three days, and I've got no response. Also, I looked on Instagram and all the other social media sites, and it seems that the person has not been active for at least one year.

So, I started to work on plan B: Using AI-generated images. I spent countless hours trying to generate a few of them, but the results were not good. Also, I discovered a site that has thousands of pre-generated AI images. I spent a few hours searching and a few more hours testing them on the site.

The AI-generated images were not what I expected for the site. The art pieces I had picked up originally were a much better fit.

Plan C enters the room: Find another artist that sells art in a digital format so I can use the images through a license. This one was pretty easy: I could find stunning art for an affordable price. But there was one term concerning me: there could be only 20,000 views of the image per month under the standard license.

Ok, the site has just ~700 unique users per month right now, but it will get bigger, and I'm afraid 20,000 views per month is just too low. So I think I'll pass on this plan for now, but it's still a valid option.

And we are back to plan A. Seeing a few comments on the artist's work on DeviantArt, I saw some people asking to use the images on YouTube and getting permission. Also, musicians were using the same art on their songs on SoundCloud.

I decided to use the images first (giving proper credits, of course, and linking back to the original work), and if the artist contacts me, I would remove them and use a few AI-generated images I liked.

So, I prepared the images and the code. If I have to remove them, I can do it in less than 1 minute, and that's it.

Site here

Lofi and Games finally got some Lofi!

After creating seven games, I decided to focus on the music part. I added a small player that plays some lofi songs. It took a lot of work to choose the music, download the audio files and images, process and store them properly, and give credit to all the artists. Sadly, it's a very manual job.

Before starting it, I was thinking of embedding a music player, but I would not be able to customize the UI to match the site. Also, Spotify doesn't allow embedding the player on game-related sites, so it was never really an option.

I'm very excited about the next release. Spoiler Alert: It will be on the home page 👀

I've been releasing games consistently since I created the site. The newest game now is Sudoku, a classic Japanese game where you have to complete a grid with numbers from 1 to 9 that do not repeat on the same row, column, and 3x3 region.

It took more time than I expected to build it. The hardest part was choosing the right colors for light and dark themes according to the game state.

I could also improve the difficulty. I'm removing random numbers from the solution until it matches the expected amount. It's not the best approach since it doesn't account for the difficulty required to solve the game.

Well, it's good for now. I'll improve it later 😅

I added a "Buy me a coffee" button using Stripe Payment Link this week.
I even tweeted about it, wondering whether I would buy an expresso or a depresso by the end of the month.

It turns out I received a $3.00 donation! It's the first money I've made from a website without using ads, and it feels incredible!

Somebody on the internet saw value in the games I made and donated real money. Now I'm more motivated than ever! Thank you, generous person!

Well, that was fast! I made a classic memory game in one day. It's that game where there are four colors, it shows a sequence of colors, and you have to press the buttons to make the same sequence.

It was quite easy to implement. I had a few problems with Safari, but I changed the implementation, so now it works seamlessly on all browsers.

Today I made that puzzle game where you have to order the numbers by sliding them. I used to play it when I was a kid, but on a physical version.

It was quite simple to develop. It was just some basic web stuff, css grid, a few animations here and there. Nothing too fancy.

I want to make as many simple games as possible, so I'll probably make a memory game next.

Game here

Remember the old Windows 98 days, when you spent a lot of time playing classic games? If so, I bet you have played minesweeper a couple times.

It's that game where there was a grid with a happy face 🙂 on top. When you clicked the grid, it would pop and show a few numbers. Clicking the wrong one would explode a bomb and the face would change to something like this 😵

I remade this game, but using cool animations and sound effects. I'm very proud of the result, it came out better than I have expected!

You can check it by yourself here https://www.lofiandgames.com/minesweeper

The official Svelte blog has a "Community Showcase" section, where it mentions a few apps and websites made with Svelte. Suddenly, I noticed the Lofi and Games site was listed there 🤯.

The moment I saw it, I was excited and proud of my work!

It's so cool to see Lofi and Games being mentioned on the official Svelte blog! I'm very grateful for it, thank you very much, Svelte team 🙏

I have just added a classic snake game to the site!

I made it using Canvas instead of relying on the DOM for rendering.

Last time it took me 8 hours to make a snake game... this one took me more than double 😅. So, what happened? This time, I added sound effects, handled touch gestures, added different speeds, made a shareable image, added a cool intro animation, and added other tiny details. Those things may sound easy, but together they take a considerable amount of time to implement correctly.

We have now 3 games in total! I think I'll add one more and then put a Lofi track on the site. After all, Lofi and Games gotta have some Lofi on it.