"Live it" is the first button in One Life: Reborn Simulator. You get a birth country rolled from real UN birth rates, you press it, and then you live one line per year For about 5 days pressing it froze the whole tab

My save code wraps localStorage.setItem so every save also gets copied into Playgama's storage (their Bridge). The sandbox link has no portal storage, so Bridge just writes the value back with localStorage.setItem... which goes through my wrapper again, which sends it to Bridge again. Endless microtask loop, dead tab The first save happens the moment you press Live it, so pretty much everyone got stuck on screen one

I'd tested on the real portal and on my own phone, where the storage exists. I never once clicked all the way through the sandbox link I was posting in 4 different threads On the 5th someone I'd never seen commented that the page froze when they hit Live it. That's how I found out

The fix keeps every sent value in an in-flight list until it's done, and if the same value comes back it doesn't get sent again. Also added a test that reproduces the loop so it can't sneak back

It works now. Playgama wants 100 plays on the sandbox before the real review, so plays through this link help with that https://playgama.ai/play/7hersnnnxaqs5l

gamepix rejected one of our browser games last week. the background music just kept going while their ad was on screen

the ad break code only muted the phaser sound manager. this one is plain html with an tag for the music, so phaser never had anything to mute

i copied the ad handling over from another one of our games and never once sat through an ad with the sound on. i always test muted

now when an ad starts, the element and web audio both go to sleep. the same fix went into our other games too. they also flagged that the rewarded buttons didn't say they'd play an ad, so those have a little video icon now. resubmitted the new build

the game is One Life: Reborn Simulator, which i made. you get born somewhere based on real UN birth shares and then live it out one line per year https://dumbgamelab.com/play/one-life/?lang=en

GamePix bounced my browser game this week. background music just kept going right over the ad

my ad break code only muted the Phaser sound manager. this one isn't Phaser, it's plain HTML with an tag for the music, so nothing got muted at all

I copied the ad handling from another of my games and never once listened with an ad actually running. always tested with the sound off lol

now on ad start the element and Web Audio both go to sleep, and I pushed the same fix to the other games too. resubmitted with the new build

edit: they also flagged that the rewarded buttons didn't say they play an ad, so those have a little video icon now. game was One Life: Reborn Simulator if anyone cares

five hearts and a guest just stays. that's the part i built everything else around

you set up a little camp in the woods and animals come by. cook for them, and once one fills its fifth heart it moves into the camp for good. there are 12 kinds of animal guests and 16 dishes, each with its own name. seasons turn over every 7 days

it plays in the itch page, nothing to download. i made it

70 share button taps over three days. Zero people came in from a shared link, zero shared links even opened. 42 of those taps were in the Android app

The app runs the game in a webview and navigator.share just doesn't exist there. So it fell back to copying the text to the clipboard with no sheet and no message. People tapped share, saw nothing happen and moved on. I only ever tested sharing in a browser where the sheet pops up fine, so I never saw it

Last week I already thought I'd fixed this. 130 shares, 0 visits, and the cause was me stripping the url params before analytics read them. Fixed that and it was still 0. There were two bugs stacked on top of each other

The app calls the native share sheet now, and a game that calls navigator.share directly inside the app gets blocked before release. It's a native plugin so it only lands with the next app build

The game is One Life: Reborn Simulator. Your birth country gets rolled from UN 2024 birth stats across 124 countries, no rerolls, and if you send your end card to a friend they start with the same birth. Free in the browser https://playgama.ai/play/7hersnnnxaqs5l

I scored my hand-drawn camp a 5.7 when I held it up against screenshots of a farm game that sold well. Then I switched the whole thing to toy-looking 3D and the score went down to 5.2, which is worse than where I started.

It took four rounds to get it to 6.8 and then 7.7. The biggest fix was a dumb one. Empty farm plots looked like holes dug in the ground, so I filled them with grass blades and tiny flowers

It's free in the browser if anyone wants to look. Do the empty plots still look like holes to you?

Backing out of Idle Internet Cafe Tycoon on iPhone and the OS would kill the web view a bit later. GPU memory never got released

my fix was a setTimeout for 8 s after the app went to background

It never ran on real phones. JS gets frozen the instant the app backgrounds, so anything sitting in a timer is just stuck. Shipped it anyway without knowing, crash reports kept showing up build after build

Now the release happens right in the same call that handles going to background

The game itself is a little PC bang tycoon, rows of computers and customers, it runs in the browser and on Android/iOS

The share link carries a birth seed (?s=) so your friend starts on the same birth you got. On load the game wiped that and the utm tail out of the address bar so it looked tidy. Analytics loaded a moment later, saw a clean URL, and logged every shared visit as direct

We nearly cut the button over it

Second bug on top of that one. Sharing from inside the itch or CrazyGames iframe handed the friend the portal's internal iframe URL, so they landed on some bare embed page.

Now the real address goes to analytics before the cleanup runs, and shares always use the public URL. Game is One Life: Reborn Simulator, browser, your birth country gets rolled from UN 2024 birth tables and you live that one life out. I made it

https://playgama.ai/play/7hersnnnxaqs5l

your birth country is rolled from the UN 2024 birth tables over 124 countries, so where you land is weighted by how many babies are actually born there. then you live that one life out. no restarting the same character. no account.

i built it. last week someone told me nothing in it was proportional and they were right. every prop had its height typed in by hand on its own scale, so the radio on the back wall was 56cm, the bicycle 73cm, and the cat was as big as the dog. the main character card got measured separately and came out 9% bigger than everyone else. now it all reads off one real-cm ruler and the build fails if a size drifts.

it has ads. two are optional reward ads and one full-screen ad plays when you die. nothing to buy.

Not sure if a prototype is ok here, it's pretty rough

I made a 3v3 gem-grab shooter that runs in the browser, Chichi Brawl. The other team is an AI that trained on about 180,000 matches against itself, with reaction time capped at human speed (0.2s or slower). Only 3 characters and one mode so far. I'm trying to get 30 people through 10 matches each to see how often humans actually beat it, results are anonymous and there's no account. Mostly want to know if it felt cheap and what confused you in the first match

This is a 3v3 gem grab shooter that runs in the browser, no install and no sign up.

The bot learned by playing about 180,000 matches against itself. Its reaction time is capped at 0.2 seconds or slower, so it can't win on twitch reflexes alone. This link always puts you against the strongest generation it has

https://dumbgamelab.com/play/chichibrawl/?ht=1&lang=en

It's a prototype with only 3 characters and one mode, so expect it to be rough. I'm trying to get about 30 people to play 10 matches each and see how often humans actually win. Results are counted anonymously, no account and no personal data.

Mostly I want to know if it felt fair or cheap, and where the first match lost you.

Good luck

Beta is open after a month of work. Seat the guests, pull start, pull unload before the queue gives up, and cook the hot dogs by hand. A day lasts 4 minutes.

Play: https://dumbgamelab.com/play/ppijukland/?lang=en

Testing a crash reporter should be easy: add a switch, kill our app, inspect the result A real iOS device turned that into a different bug when the signal got intercepted before termination We were no longer testing whether crashes were reported We were fixing why the deliberately broken part would not break, which is a strange thing to put in a pull request.

I uploaded a build of my browser game to a game portal and the upload analysis came back with a 2 GB memory warning. The game is a life sim with a rotating globe on the title screen, so I suspected the globe canvas.

Fix one, 11:10: moved the globe onto its own compositing layer. Fix two, 11:21: switched it to a software canvas. Fix three, 11:53: pulled the logo out of normal flow with position: absolute, so nothing overlapped the globe anymore. That one worked. Forty-three minutes, three pull requests.

The first two were guesses, because I kept shipping the next change before the analyzer had finished judging the previous one. The thing I should have done at 11:10 was wait for the result and then change one thing.

If you've fought a portal's automatic checks, did yours ever blame the heavy thing when the cause was something sitting on top of it? The game is free in the browser: https://dumbgamelab.itch.io/one-life

The customers and staff in my amusement park tycoon had a walk animation, but players were telling me nobody walked. They glided. Looking at them at the game's actual scale, the four leg frames barely differed.

Ppijukland is a 2D isometric web game that also runs on phones, so this is the size the animation needs to work at. The updated walk adds a small hop, with some squash and tilt to make each step visible.

The step phase is based on distance travelled rather than elapsed time, and it also selects the leg frame. Has anyone else had a walk cycle where the poses were simply too similar to read at the size used in the game?

My earlier game, Idle Internet Cafe Tycoon, runs in the browser: https://qqq1212341.github.io/pcbang-alba-sim/

In one run of my game a woman in Mexico sat on a park bench with her best friend, watching people pass for an hour without saying anything. The next line was that she died at 73.

I'm the solo dev. Clean the seat so the next customer can sit, and get the ramen out before 20 seconds pass or they storm out. A day lasts 2 minutes and the game keeps earning while the tab is closed.

Play: https://qqq1212341.github.io/pcbang-alba-sim/

No sign-up needed. It also has Android and iPhone versions, but this is the browser one.

I measured who actually does the work in my cafe sim and the owner, a cat that dozes at the counter, was grabbing 84% of the cleaning and cooking jobs. The part-timers you pay a wage every day were mostly standing around. In 2.0.11 the order is flipped: staff take a job first and the owner only steps in when the shop is busy.

It's a placement tycoon (6 seats to start, a day lasts 2 minutes). Free in the browser: https://qqq1212341.github.io/pcbang-alba-sim/

Also on Android and iOS.

Made this one alone. Tap Be born, the globe stops on a dot, and your country, your family's means and your sex follow real birth shares (UN World Population Prospects 2024, 124 countries). After that it's one line a year: a friend, a failed test, moving house, a first love. At the crossroads (college or work, marriage or living alone) your answer changes what comes next, and there are 30 jobs.

Play: https://qqq1212341.github.io/one-life/

No account, works on a phone or a laptop. English, Japanese and Korean. What I can't judge myself is whether those crossroads feel like they matter, so that's the part I'd like players to poke at.