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Games

  • The NYT Is (Also) a Games Company

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    I shipped a silly game to sell a keyboard, hit #4 on Product Hunt, and came away convinced the Times took this hundred-year-old playbook to another level.

    I just shipped a game called QWERTYS. It’s Tetris with a twist: the board is your keyboard, and pieces made of letters fall over the same keys you type on every day. The whole thing took me a week, pair programming with Claude, and I genuinely can’t remember the last time building something was this much fun. I’m lying… I caught myself laughing out loud at 2 a.m. while building the ridiculous Tiny Mario on braille characters.

    QWERTYS exists to promote Smart Keys (an iOS/MacOS smart keyboard for people like me who write in a second language and would rather not sound super awkward… maybe, just a bit). For a long time I wanted a playful thing to do that job, the way Blurry Birds does it for Bird Rise, and I kept collecting ideas about using the keyboard as a game board until one of them finally felt right.

    I launched it on Product Hunt and finished the day at #4. A few spots below, at #9, sat Tiny Mario. I want to be precise about what happened there: I beat Mario (okay, a tetris-inspired game beat tiny fan-made Mario, but let me have this one).

    Didn’t spend 5 minutes posting on PH, haven’t asked any famous hunter, and uploaded just one image. It seems the less time I spend planning lunch, the higher the rank. :p

    Now the part nobody puts in the launch tweet

    There’s a name for this kind of stunt. The book Traction calls it Engineering as Marketing, one of the nineteen channels it walks through, and it’s the one I keep going back to like comfort food. Over the years I’ve built personality tests, small free tools, a joke site about British tea time (teatime.london), Instagram filters, strava extensions and games. All of them had the same day job, which was bringing people to whatever I was selling at the time.

    I recently invested more in that channel, naively inspired by the success of The New York Times games, either by acquiring or building them. These are very casual games that keep their audience engaged and leverage virality. Ultimately, they drive users to their news (so naive… so naive, Dieguito).

    Good launches! Did your revenue increase 10x?

    – BFF VC

    So I can tell you, with the confidence of someone who has run this experiment way too many times, that…

    It doesn’t work.. sorry 🙁

    I mean, at least not the way people want it to work, as the magical main channel that replaces actually marketing your product.

    The spike and the drip

    Every one of these launches has the same shape. You get a spike on day one, when Product Hunt or Reddit or whoever decides you’re cute that morning, and then the line falls off a cliff and settles into a quiet drip that goes on for years. The drip is real. People still find teatime.london through searches I will never understand, and a small portion are guided to my products, but it’s a drip.

    QWERTYS itch.io stats: The spike gets the screenshot, the drip gets the next five years.
    The results for downloads of Smart Keys are almost unnoticeable though. 🙁

    What the drip buys you is the boring stuff that compounds. Backlinks and domain authority, some SEO, and lately a bit of AEO too (when LLMs start recommending your stuff). That already caught me by surprise. It’s not just me who is hallucinating about my product’s impact.

    Bird Rise, a popular app sweeeeeeping Instagram…

    So yeah, this is the issue with channels like Eng. as Marketing, the results are quite out of your control. That’s the reason I keep it as a secondary channel with low expectations. My main engine is still paid ads, the unsexy thing I keep defending in every conversation about marketing.

    A whole week, Diego. On a free game? For a drip?

    – The responsible adult who lives in my head

    Why I keep building them anyway

    Because the math changed underneath this channel. A game like QWERTYS would have cost me a month or two of evenings a few years ago, and for a payout of “some domain authority and one fun day on Product Hunt” that’s a hard sell. It took me a week with Claude. When the price of a bet drops that much and the payout stays the same, a channel that used to be marginal becomes an easy yes. Low expectations are perfectly fine when the ticket is cheap.

    Have you caught the flags on QWERTYS?
    I had so much fun implementing the keyboard layout change and adding this twist to the game.

    There’s also a craft reason, and it took me a few of these to see it. QWERTYS makes you stare at a keyboard, which happens to be exactly where Smart Keys lives. Blurry Birds makes you look closely at birds, which is exactly the mood Bird Rise sells. The game never demos the product, it just makes you spend time in the product’s world, and by the time you notice, my product may be presented as the obvious next step.

    So you couldn’t pull off the NYT trick, and now you’re dressing it up as philosophy?

    – The Horse

    The New York Times is lying (a little)

    All of this is downstream of the NYT, of course. They built and acquired games as a channel for the news, the crossword first and then Wordle and friends, and today Games anchors their subscription bundle. They keep saying they never became a games company. I don’t believe them, and I suspect their accountants don’t either. Something that began as lead generation is now included in their package of services.

    But the truth is more interesting than the gotcha. They’re not just a games company, they’re a place where news, sports, education (their cooking section is a whole universe), and games live together, which is exactly what newspapers were for centuries. The crossword sat next to the front page and nobody had an identity crisis about it.

    So their games aren’t just a channel or stunts, they’re part of their offer.

    What starts as a channel

    That’s the version of this I actually want to build. The Sunrise is supposed to become a place where you find entertainment, news, education and small tools that make your day a little better. Bird Rise wakes you gently, a small game nudges your brain awake, and you come away knowing one new thing about the bird that sang you out of bed. That’s the seed, and I want to grow it. Somewhere down the road I want a curated feed of news about nature and birds, the kind of thing you read with your coffee instead of doomscrolling.

    So no, games won’t market your product magically, not on their own. You’ll get a launch spike, a long quiet drip, and a genuinely fun week building one. As a channel it earns a steady second place, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise. But I love building too much to be reasonable about it, so I let that second place keep first place somewhere the metrics dashboard can’t reach (first in my heart).

    And every so often, the math surprises me. Something I built mostly because it was fun turns out to be a small part of the bigger thing I actually wanted to create all along. After all, what am I here for?

  • Tiny Games, Big Feelings

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    Everything actually started when I played Loneliness. What a strange, quiet punch of a game. I wasn’t expecting much (it’s just little squares on a white screen) but somehow it managed to pull more emotions out of me in two minutes than most AAA games do in fifty hours. I walked away confused and weirdly emotional, like someone had whispered something important into my ear and then vanished.

    So of course I did the only reasonable thing: I became obsessed. I hunted down the creator, Jordan Magnuson, and ended up reading his book Game Poems, which didn’t help at all because now I’m even more obsessed.

    The whole idea that games can be short, intentional emotional gestures suddenly made sense. Then I stumbled upon URL Snake, this tiny absurd miracle living inside the URL bar, built entirely with Braille characters. I did what I always do when I find something tiny and clever, I became obsessed with its creator, Demian Ferreiro.

    So on a sunny weekend, I decided to experiment with those ideas. The first result was Tiny Horse, a tiny creature leaping across my URL bar like it’s trying to outrun my unfinished tasks.

    Tiny Horse, Tiny Jump!

    Then came Tiny Mario, who took the same microscopic canvas and somehow turned it into a full side‑scrolling adventure powered entirely by Braille characters and misplaced confidence.

    Tiny Mario

    I actually built this second one in secret from Leandra because I was supposed to be working on a different project and not making games anymore. I kept two instances of Windsurf open, and whenever she walked by, I switched to the main project (she is the boss).

    I was surprised that I could work on two projects at the same time, with one assistant coding some complex tasks while working with the other. Obviously, I was paying much more attention to the game though. ;p

    They’re not big games. They’re not meant to be. They’re little moments. Digital haikus. Emotional blips. I build them fast, break them faster, and still feel strangely proud of them.

    And you know what? While building and playing them, I kept noticing how these tiny games trigger emotions so quickly. Simple graphics, a couple of sound cues, and suddenly I’m laughing out loud on a Saturday night at 11 p.m. because I made Tiny Mario slip into an underground level through tiny pipes.

    Besides being simple, they include classic casual game elements that spark some adrenaline: scores, countdown, enemies, rewards, obstacles, and elements of surprise. Something I haven’t been able to add to Air Fiesta yet.

    If you want to see what all this tiny-game energy looks like:

    And if you want to feel the thing that started all this:

    Game poems are small, but they hit hard, like tiny sparks pretending they aren’t capable of starting whole wildfires. And honestly, maybe that’s exactly what makes them beautiful… and powerful.

    Nov 18th Update

    I wasn’t expecting people to get this excited about a tiny game. I posted it on Product Hunt and Reddit just for fun and suddenly folks were actually into it. It’s not the kind of thing people usually share there, but I guess we’re all craving fewer AI products and more silly things like this.

    Give it a vote if you feel like it. We already beat a Google product (which feels surreal and funny at the same time).

    Tiny Mario - Play the ridiculously tiny Mario ever right in your URL bar. | Product Hunt

  • Air Fiesta: When the Balloons Multiplied

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    There was a time when everyone shared a single balloon. That was Airtales, one collective flight drifting wherever the crowd decided. Democracy by wind. Chaos by design. It was beautiful, but also… a little limiting. People wanted to explore their own skies. This is why it started and how it ended.

    That’s how Air Fiesta happened, a pivot, or maybe a parallel universe. Now every player has their own balloon. You can float above your neighborhood, drift over famous cities, or join in festivals with friends. No borders, no passport required.

    Underneath it all, it still runs on the same energy: curiosity, community, and a touch of absurd optimism that maybe the world makes more sense from 300 feet up.

    Nature and weather conditions are your challenges.

    What’s New

    Air Fiesta is built on Google Maps SDK, so what you see is the real planet. You can tune into local radio stations while you fly (because every city sounds different).

    You can take photos of your journey, discover hidden treasures, and battle weather that’s way less forgiving than it looks. Gusty winds, thermals, fog, even flocks of birds (the kind of chaos that makes you laugh right before it throws you off course).

    And what about the balloon festivals? They’re still happening. They will probably change into something simpler. Right now, it’s a scavenger hunt with virtual friends. But it seems a bit complicated, so it will likely become more like freely collecting hidden gems.

    One big improvement was the mobile experience. The game is still based on web technology (ThreeJS), which is tricky to run on mobile, but you can try it out on the App Store or Play Store. Coming soon on Steam.

    Why I Still Care About Radio

    Radio’s the heartbeat of Air Fiesta. I’ve always loved it, the crackle, the local ads, the DJs who sound like they’ve seen things. There’s something deeply human about tuning into a city’s voice while you’re hovering over it.

    I’m reaching out to stations now, (community, college, indie, public) to ask permission to float them inside the game. Because I want players to hear the places they fly over, not just see them.

    If you run a station, you can see a preview of what that looks like:
    See a balloon radio in New York and another in the Bay Area. This is more like a non-interactive mode where you can “watch” other players.

    Special thanks to Radio Browser technology for providing the geo-position of radios worldwide for free.

    Where Air Fiesta Is Cancelled

    Not everywhere is safe to fly.

    Inspired by the Global Conflict Tracker and Freedom Flotilla, I mapped ongoing conflicts around the world: wars, occupations, humanitarian crises. The result was staggering. In those regions, Air Fiesta goes silent.

    It’s not meant as protest or pity, more like a pause. When the world is burning, sometimes silence says more than scenery.

    Maybe one day those places will light up again with music, laughter, and balloons rising together. Until then, the silence stays.

    Feed and Gallery

    Since Airtales has a feature that is quite unique (the camera), like a real balloon adventure, you can take pictures of your views. It’s no different here; people feel excited about doing that, so I keep it.

    The improvement from the previous version is that you can now see pictures, messages, and other balloon interactions in a feed format.

    What’s missing?

    I think there are important pieces missing or not quite right. The story, for example, seems weak or almost nonexistent. Another important aspect is world-building. Currently, interactions with the world are almost zero. I think players should be able to build or change something in the real world. Right now, it’s almost like a ‘leave no trace’ approach, but it could be cool if they could move things around, clean the ocean, deliver letters, or even destroy borders :p

    You can see follow the progress on Itch.io, for the first time I’m documenting the changelog there, it’s quite interesting.

    The Sky Is the Limit

    Air Fiesta isn’t about competition. There’s no score. No finish line. Just weather, music, and motion. It’s a little weird and a little hopeful, a floating experiment in what happens when you mix geography, sound, and strangers who want to explore together. This won’t trigger dopamine traps, and you won’t become addicted to it.

    Maybe that’s the game I’ve always wanted to play: one where the world is the level, and connection is the win condition.

    ✈️ Play at airfiesta.fm or read the manifesto if you’re into that kind of thing.

    Credits

    Air Fiesta FM is a labor of love crafted by a small team (Diego and Leandra) and a generous community. This page recognizes the people, technologies, and resources that made it possible.

    These are just a few of the people and companies that made this project possible.

    Special thanks

    • Our early players and testers who shared feedback and found edge cases.
    • The open source community for tools, libraries, and inspiration.
    • Friends and family for the support during late-night builds.

  • Airtales: When the Balloon Landed

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    The last screenshot

    Airtales was never meant to last forever. I even had a line on the roadmap asking when and where the balloon would land. Still, it drifted across Google Earth like a stubborn daydream, a collective ride where strangers became crew.

    Fifty days in the sky

    I spent about fifty days building it, then another fifty days watching it float. In that time, 8,606 people climbed aboard. At one point 167 players were trying to steer it at the same time. Along the way, 145 photos were snapped, 234 local radios played, and the balloon wandered across thousands of virtual miles.

    I had a blast, and also a fair amount of frustration, making it. Game development is nothing like building an app. Apps usually have a problem to solve. Games? Unless boredom is a problem (which I don’t agree), they exist for entertainment. That makes the process slippery. You build something, test if it feels fun, throw it away when it doesn’t, or let it spark a new idea when it does.

    The balloon’s messy handwriting across the sky, fifty days of drifting together.

    What I Learned

    • Collective chaos. Everyone steering the same balloon at once was as wild as it sounds. Fun for a while, then pure chaos. The most requested feature was obvious: give people their own balloons.
    • Two kinds of players. Some wanted to navigate carefully, to reach specific places. Others were content to just watch. Like social media, there were pilots and lurkers.
    • Screenshots became souvenirs. The photos people shared blew me away. Taking a picture of a virtual trip sounds silly, yet some were stunning. In Airtales they felt like postcards from a shared dream. Roblox and Steam also encourage capturing gameplay, but in Airtales it felt more like postcards from a shared dream.
    • Google Maps hurdles. Getting Maps to play nice with the game was tough. I liked the final solution until I learned caching map tiles is against Google policy. That one stung.
    • Twitch experiments. I hooked Twitch chat into the game so players could teleport the balloon or send messages that got read aloud. I streamed some flights too. But requiring a Twitch account kept most people away. I never wanted to build my own chat system, since moderation is a nightmare, but this wasn’t the answer. Copyright takedowns on radio streams didn’t help either.
    • Local radios. These were huge for the vibe, and even part of my distribution strategy. I even reached out to a few stations and some shared it on their socials. That felt like a win.
    • Stories in the sky. I tried mixing in book excerpts and AI-generated geo-stories about migration, philosophy, global unity. I hoped they would add poetry to the ride. They never really fit.
    • Web tech has grown up. Browser-based 3D is powerful now. Still clunky on mobile, but impressive nonetheless.

    Travel Log

    A collection of snapshots from my journey and players who turned their virtual flights into postcards. The gallery is less about graphics and more about the human impulse to document a journey, even when it happens on a digital map.

    Why It Mattered

    Airtales was an experiment. I wanted to see if I still enjoyed game development, explore new stacks, find out which platforms are thriving, and hear from real players. By that measure, it worked. It reminded me why I like building things that don’t fit neatly into categories. It gave me a reason to keep going.

    So here’s to what comes next. I’ll see you floating around the world, each of us in our own balloon, part of one oversized fiesta in the sky.

  • The Story Behind Airtales

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    We Ride the Plural of Horizon

    I created a game that offers a meditative multiplayer experience, where strangers on the internet work together to steer a hot air balloon across the world map. There are no points, no ads, and no reason to play, other than the shared pleasure of drifting somewhere together. It’s called Airtales.fm, and this is the story of how it came to be.

    Maps, Simulations, and Elevation Lines

    A decade ago, I used to build simulation games. Not the Farmville kind, but slow-burn social experiments where groups could experience simulated situations and environments. One of them was a Google Earth-based experience where you could place future civic projects on real-world terrain. It was naive and idealistic and fun in the way that only city planning with strangers on the internet can be.

    Apparently, I never outgrew the habit of turning maps into toys. To this day, I lose hours staring at elevation lines. They’re just little whispers of geography, hinting at how the land moves.

    This is a short clip from my 2014 demo reel, giving a glimpse of what those projects were about.

    Borders, and the Absence of Calm

    I can’t remember ever feeling calm crossing a border.

    Maybe it’s the paperwork. Or the implicit judgment. Or the feeling of being reduced to numbers and stamps and visa types.

    Leandra, my co-conspirator in life and Airtales, feels weirdly at peace when crossing borders. It’s possibly the only time she’s not anxious. I envy that.

    Airtales isn’t a therapy project, but I think it comes from that tension. From the desire to imagine a world you can cross without being interrogated. A world where your direction is shaped not by privilege or paperwork, but by shared intention.

    Internet Roadtrips and Open Source Sparks

    The first real spark came from Neal Agarwal’s Internet Roadtrip. It was clever and charming and reminded me how much delight there still is in just looking at a map.

    That led to a lot of late-night poking around: open APIs, weird WebGL tricks, satellite tiles, and browser hacks. We spent two weeks not building anything, just playing. Like raccoons in a code garage.

    Thank god for open source. Without it, this project would’ve taken six months. With it, we built a working prototype in under four weeks.

    Built While Floating

    We made Airtales while traveling, a new kind of travel for us, pet sitting around the Bay Area. Writing balloon code while playing with dogs and trying to find where the f*ck the cheese shredder went.

    At first, I worried about staying productive while constantly moving and swapping kitchens every week. I still have a lot to learn about having a real routine, but weirdly, it worked. I felt just as productive, maybe even more so, than working from home.

    We built a game about drifting while actually drifting.

    Kitt
    Zoe

    Democracy by Wind

    The core mechanic is simple: the crowd votes where the balloon goes.

    It’s multiplayer navigation without a driver’s seat. Democracy as drift.

    Giving up control can be frustrating. But also kind of beautiful. Especially when strangers align. When east wins by a landslide. Or when everyone agrees to climb.

    We added no incentives. No rewards. No FOMO. Just shared direction. That felt like enough.

    Stories, Dust, and Radio Signals

    Players can tune into real local radio stations as they float, or request a story about the land below.

    I spent a whole hour floating around Brazil listening to ‘The Voice of Brazil.’ This is a unique government radio program produced by the country’s public broadcaster. The program must be aired during at 7:00 PM by all Brazilian radio stations every weeknight. It is the oldest radio program in the country and the longest-running in the Southern Hemisphere. I used to hate that, but I was so nostalgic that I couldn’t stop listening to it.

    Sometimes, the game responds with a poetic fragment. Like:

    “Pollen from fields rises to meet ash from distant suns. We breathe both.”

    We wrote dozens of those lines. They appear at random. Like thoughts that float in when you stop scrolling.

    The game doesn’t track your location, but it does cross borders. When that happens, it whispers things like:

    “Line crossed. No paperwork needed.”

    Writing the Story (Then Unwriting It)

    I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to write the perfect narrative arc for Airtales. It went through many phases: at one point it was called Caballoon and had an elaborate mythos about sentient currents guiding the balloon through post-border landscapes. Then it was Airmob, a kind of poetic resistance simulator where players were digital nomads staging soft rebellions with every vote. Then, the Airborn, people who were born in a balloon and don’t understand the concept of borders. Then a cryptic AI whispering through radio static. Then a sci-fi climate story unfolding over time.

    None of it felt quite right. Not because they were bad stories (or maybe they were), but because they competed with the space I was trying to build.

    So I scrapped it. All of it. In the end, I made something simpler.

    Now the story comes from the players. The balloon holds their votes, their messages, their traces. It floats with fragments of everyone who passed through. And that felt more honest than anything I could script. A collective and slow balloon ride wandering through this beautiful world.

    Messages in the Basket

    I wanted to simulate a kind of real travel that lets you leave traces, not likes, not high scores, just moments. So I added a camera.

    Yes, you can take pictures in Airtales. Of a virtual landscape. It sounded silly when I first built it, but I ended up loving it.

    Inside the balloon basket, players can leave tiny messages, a photo and a note. These become floating souvenirs. You can even pin them to specific locations on the map. It’s a guestbook that moves with the wind.

    The Tech

    I could talk about it for days, but let’s keep it brief.

    The front end runs on Three.js, which I love. The backend handles vote logic and location updates. We looked into Youtube chat integration, radios database, Discord bots, even livestream overlays. I’m excited about the Twitch API. There are so many interesting things to integrate with your game. This entire game feels like a collaborative livestream.

    Some things broke. Some things refused to scale. The balloon doesn’t always float where it should. But it floats.

    Because everyone is in the same place geographically, the number of live users doesn’t impact map API usage too much. And we cache tiles in case the balloon loops around, which it often does.

    There were some scenarios I hadn’t expected that called for technical changes. For example, when I showed it to some friends, they said they’d love to play this while watching the balloon on a TV in the dentist’s waiting room. Indeed, the whole thing looks like that tvOS screensaver. Another friend said that with some tweaks, it could be one of those TV party games.

    Indeed, the game on a TV looks so beautiful.

    Why This? Why Now?

    Because the world feels a little too divided. And fast. And extractive.

    We weren’t trying to fix that. Just offer a different rhythm. One where exploration isn’t gamified, and strangers can co-steer something just for the joy of doing it.

    We didn’t build a product. We built a feeling.

    The air up here is light.
    That’s the whole point.

    What’s Next?

    Well, I managed to merge all my favorite things into one project: maps, music, stories, and views. Maybe I’ll be the only one playing it, but that’s fine.

    This project revived my excitement for game development. It’s a very different energy from building apps. Apps solve things. Games chase joy, reduce boredom, invite play.

    We’re already thinking about other games, all real-world map based with touches of activism baked in.

    We’re not done drifting yet.

    Credits

    These are just a few of the people and companies that made this project possible.