Hi everyone, I’m Jesse, the developer of OnlineTetris. I built a browser-based Tetris with vanilla JS + HTML5 Canvas. I launched the first version at the end of April and then basically left it alone. A month later I noticed around twenty new players were playing every day—some even reported bugs. So I started fixing things and iterating. Now it’s at 2,000+ monthly active users across hundreds of cities. Here I’ll share my motivation, technical details, key features, how “zero marketing” played out, some data, and a few takeaways.

1. The Idea: Why Tetris?

One day in April this year I suddenly remembered the feeling of playing Tetris on a handheld as a kid: simple rules, instant feedback, and when you lose, you can instantly try again. I wanted a web version you can open and play anytime—a small tribute to that era. I shipped the first version at the end of April. I didn’t plan any promotion or ongoing ops—just “ship it and park it.”

A month later I happened to check the numbers: roughly 20 players a day. Even more surprising, people were leaving comments on-site with lots of suggestions—gameplay, UI styling, etc. That’s when I realized some folks genuinely liked it. I began fixing bugs and iterating based on their feedback.

2. Technical Details: How I Built It

• Frontend stack: HTML5 + vanilla JavaScript + Tailwind CSS. Keep it simple so I can maintain it solo.
• Rendering: Canvas + requestAnimationFrame. I made some classic mistakes at first:
• Tying refresh rate too tightly to game logic, which caused high GPU usage and animation stutter;
• Overeager partial redraws—redrawing areas that didn’t need it;
• Browser/device differences (especially iGPUs) made edge cases more visible.
• What I changed:
• Split the “logic ” from the “rendering ” to reduce wasted frames;
• Use minimal dirty-rectangle redraws whenever possible;
• Run animations on a lightweight, separate path to reduce interference;
• Added effects degradation for integrated graphics (e.g., lower animation frequency for some themes).
• Backend:
• Supabase for the database.
• Each finished game round is stored and pushed to the leaderboard in real time.
• Aggregations for the leaderboard live in SQL views to avoid piling too much logic into the frontend.

3. Notable Features

① Global Leaderboard (Individual)

• Ranking by each player’s personal high score to drive engagement and a sense of achievement.
• Basic validation on submissions to reduce anomalous data.

② Global Leaderboard (Regional)

• Aggregate scores by region to get a region’s total points, and rank regions globally.
• I’m refining “bubble markers” on the map (zoom, hover for details).

③ Skin System

• Pure “joy engineering”: wood, neon, retro, pixel, etc.
• A real-world lesson: pretty ≠ high-perf. Some theme animations don’t love iGPUs, so I added toggles and graceful degradation.

4. “Marketing”: I Basically Didn’t Do Any

• I’m not a marketing person and had no budget.
• No ads or press at launch.
• I only shared the link with a few friends—after that it spread organically.
• Honestly, this forced me to spend time on the experience itself.

5. Six-Month Snapshot

• It’s been about half a year since launch.
• MAU: steady at 2,000+.
• Geography: players from hundreds of cities worldwide.
• Feeling: small in scale but real. Some people keep coming back.

6. Lessons Learned: Taught by Players

• Treat players like friends. Every piece of feedback is product review help. If someone says animations stutter, I go record a flamegraph; if someone says lock-in feels off, I rework the “grounding delay” logic.
• Experience first, even for tiny details. For instance, “Should there be a short movable window after a piece touches down?” dramatically affects feel.
• Optimize for real hardware. Many users are on integrated graphics—don’t only build “soul-stirring” effects on high-end machines.

7. Updates & What’s Next

• In progress:
• Further reducing GPU pressure for certain themes;
• Polishing map interactions for the regional leaderboard;
• Planned:
• A fuller “City Championship” mode;
• Achievements/titles and light incentives.

Final Thoughts

This project began with nostalgia, survived on player feedback, and keeps rolling by getting the small things right. If you’re also building a web mini-game, I’d love to chat about and game feel; if you’re just passing by as a player, please feel free to take it for a spin—complaints welcome.

Site: onlinetetris.org (Play a couple of rounds anytime. I’ll keep listening and polishing.)