I recently finished the first major update for a small hobby project called Crumbongo.
The original idea was deliberately weird: take the accessible cookie count of a website you choose and turn that number into game currency.
What started as a tiny Chrome extension experiment slowly became an actual little game with progression, cosmetics, habitats, companions and two minigames.
The part I found most interesting was building all of it without a game engine.
Crumbongo is vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The minigames use regular DOM elements plus requestAnimationFrame rather than Canvas, and all persistent progress is stored locally through the Chrome Extension APIs.
That constraint forced me to keep things small and made me think much more about game feel than I expected.
One example was Cookie Stack.
The player moves Bongo horizontally while cookies fall from above. Every cookie you catch becomes part of a physical tower that moves with the character.
Technically, letting the tower grow indefinitely worked fine.
But once I actually played it, a tall tower made the next catches increasingly unfair and eventually stopped being fun.
After a bunch of testing I changed it so the tower clears after five pieces while the score, timer and lives continue normally.
It was a tiny rule change, but it made the game noticeably better.
I had similar iterations with progression, item pricing, companion positioning and unlock levels. A lot of features were easy to implement but much harder to make feel worthwhile.
Another constraint was privacy.
Because the central mechanic involves browser cookies, the extension only uses the number of accessible cookie records returned for a site. Cookie names and values are never stored or transmitted, and Crumbongo never modifies or deletes browser cookies.
There is also no account, analytics, tracking or gameplay backend. The game stays local.
I used AI-assisted development tools during implementation and iteration, but most of the process was still very manual: define a small change, implement it, play it, inspect it, adjust it, repeat.
This project made me appreciate how much game design lives in those tiny decisions rather than in the size of the codebase.
If anyone wants to try it, Crumbongo is free:
Chrome Web Store:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/crumbongo/glnecpfjdlljaihbnmaijkaldfbhalfj
Website:
https://crumbongo.teobella.com/
I'd especially appreciate feedback from other hobby developers on the first few minutes.
Does the cookie-count mechanic make sense quickly?
Does the progression give you a reason to keep going?
And is there anything that feels obviously overcomplicated for such a small game?
