This “new” game has a special place in my heart. It’s a re-imagining of a game I played all the time in high school back in the early 2000s. Late nights spent with friends pre-cable internet. Using our AOL connections and firing up Acrophobia. Making inside jokes and coming up with clever acronyms to make each other laugh (and hopefully score points too!). I actually wrote a version of this back in 2017 as part of my prototypes that came before Gametje. This one is luckily far more polished visually and with proper gameplay mechanics. Meet AcroByte:

Gametje hit the front page of HackerNews!

For those of you that don’t know what HackerNews is, it’s a social news website mainly focused on tech topics with a focus on entrepreneurship and start-ups. It is run by Y Combinator which is a start up incubator in San Francisco, California.

I’ve been an avid reader of HackerNews for 12+ years. It’s part of my daily routine to read and check out all the cool projects people are working on. I’ve largely been just a consumer of the platform, only posting a few replies here or there over the years.

A couple weeks ago (November 5th), I had the pleasure of attending the Dutch Games Association (DGA) Network Lunch in Utrecht, hosted by Slashdot. I signed up to be one of the showcases and luckily I was selected! That gave me a chance to show off Gametje to others and get some feedback in person. I haven’t done anything like this before, so I was a little bit nervous. It would be the first time getting feedback from strangers in person rather than just my friends &family.

I’m back at it! I was on vacation in the Ardennes (Belgium) with my family and some friends. It was a bit rainy but we enjoyed all the outdoor time and fresh air.

The issue

Canvas Clash has been out for about a year and has been one of the most popular games on the platform but it has always had one major drawback: the lack of AI players. In order to start playing, you must have at least 3 players which means you need at least 2 other people (or browser tabs) to give it a try. All the other games have the ability to add AI players so you can give the games a try. Canvas Clash poses a bit more of an issue as “drawing” isn’t the easiest thing for a computer to replicate.

On October 10th, 2025, we had our first Gametje night at Het Rotterdam Collectief. Our first event had 8 people (and my 2 kids) present for the fun. Most joiners had not played any of my the games before.

We had a mixture of nationalities present including Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, American, and Polish. Quite the diverse crowd! We had some delicious snacks and some drinks and played ~7 games over 2.5 hours. Canvas Clash was the favorite, but we also played Snaption, Sync Think, and Requip.

In the last 30 days, Gametje has been played in over 40 countries and over 60 countries in the last 6 months! I’m really blown away by how far it has reached with basically no advertising. It is always interesting to get a new country trying it out and makes me wonder “How did you find it?”. I wish I had a way to reach out to them.

Full time?

Gametje has been a side project of mine since January 2023. For the first 2 years or so, I had 12-15 hours a week to work on it (+ evenings). In January 2025, I took on another freelance job alongside my regular part-time job so I have only been able to work during my evenings and weekends. Progress was slow and I haven’t been able to execute on all the ideas I have had for new games and improvements to the website. I mainly took the freelance job to earn enough money to bootstrap working on Gametje full-time. I’ve been wanting to try it for quite a while and now it seems like I will be able to do that. Starting from August, I will be able to put my full focus into Gametje.

Gametje V1

If you have read my about page, you may remember that I did an initial implementation of a couple games back in the Fall of 2017. I mainly did it at the time to learn NodeJS which was all the rage back then. I was able to build the frontend and backend in the same code base and it mostly worked. I also deployed it using the Heroku free tier which was pretty neat. At the time, I didn’t know much about containerization/Docker or running my own VPS, so it was the simplest way to share it with friends. You also can’t argue with free (the database too!). I was able to develop a prototype pretty quickly, but I never felt that comfortable with NodeJS. Typescript wasn’t really around yet and I missed the strongly typed help from Java. My job at that time was primarily backend oriented with some frontend built using jsps which were dated even at that time…

Getting Ideas

My kids have been bugging me about creating another game that they can play. I already have RPS SHOOT which is a twist on the classic Rock, Paper, Scissors game that they enjoy, but that game is nearly a year old now. Kids get bored easily and always want a shiny new thing to play with after all. My daughter is not able to read that well yet so I knew I needed to do something without many words. I thought about the games my kids like to play. Some of their current favorites are UNO, Go Fish, Memory and Yahtzee. They also love to play hide and seek (especially when I pretend to be bad at looking). Last year, I had been playing around with some protoypes using HTML Canvas to try to make a more traditional game on the platform. I looked at PixiJS which seemed promising but was a bit overkill for what I wanted to do. Perhaps I’ll revisit that in the future for other games.

New Game - Sync Think

I have been working on a new game that is currently available for Alpha testers. The working title is ‘Sync Think’. The general idea is for players to submit a random word or phrase and then work together to converge on a single word. The faster you match with another player, the more points you’ll score. It is inspired by this improv game called Mind Meld. It is typically only played with two players, but my version supports 2-16 players. When more then 2 people are playing, two words from the myriad of guesses are chosen randomly to be the words for the next “level”. With many people playing, it is possible for some players to match and others not. Once you match, you’ll score points. It continues until everyone has matched or one player is left out. It will also stop after the maximum level has been reached (currently set at 7).