I've been making things for the web for a while. Tools, mostly — applications that help teams do work more efficiently, collaborative platforms, that sort of thing. Useful stuff, but not the kind of thing you'd describe as fun to use. At some point I started wondering what it would feel like to build something that people wanted to use purely because it was enjoyable. Not because it made their job easier or their workflow faster. Just because it was good.
That's where Woodyn started. It's a simple idea: a small collection of browser games, built carefully, that don't ask anything of the player beyond showing up.
The Problem with Most Free Browser Games
Spend an hour browsing free browser or mobile games and you'll notice a pattern. The mechanics are often interesting — the core idea, the thing that probably got greenlit in the first place, is usually genuinely clever. But everything layered on top of it is working against you.
Timers that run out and force you to wait or pay. Interstitial ads between every attempt. Artificial difficulty spikes that disappear if you spend money. Notification prompts, login walls, daily reward systems designed to manufacture habit rather than encourage genuine enjoyment. The games themselves are almost secondary to the engagement mechanics built around them.
This isn't a moral judgment — it's a business reality. Building and distributing games costs money, and the advertising and freemium models that fund most of these games require certain behaviors from players. But it does mean that the experience of playing a free browser game in 2025 is often fundamentally worse than it should be, not for any technical reason, but because the incentives are misaligned.
Woodyn is an experiment in whether you can build something different and still have it work.
What "Handcrafted" Actually Means
The word appears in the tagline and on every game page, and I want to be specific about what I mean by it — because it's easy to use as meaningless marketing language.
In the context of Woodyn, handcrafted means three concrete things.
First, the games are built from scratch. There's no game engine, no pre-built physics library, no visual framework doing the heavy lifting. Every mechanic, every animation, every particle effect is written directly. This is slower and harder than using a toolkit — but it means the games are exactly what they need to be and nothing else. No bloat, no generic feel, no constraints imposed by tools that weren't designed for this specific game.
Second, the design decisions are made by feel, not by data. I don't run A/B tests on whether the leaf should be slightly more or less responsive. I don't measure average session length and tune difficulty to extend it. I play the game, think about what feels right, change it, play it again. This is slow. It's also the only way I know how to get to something that feels genuinely good rather than clinically optimized.
Third, the daily puzzles in Decant are actually handcrafted — I don't generate them algorithmically and filter for quality. Each one is built and tested by hand to make sure it's solvable, interesting, and at roughly the right difficulty for that day's spot in the puzzle calendar. A generated puzzle can be correct without being satisfying. A handcrafted one can be designed to feel satisfying specifically.
The Catalogue Approach
One decision that shaped everything else: Woodyn is a collection, not a single game. This felt right for a few reasons.
Different games suit different moods. Canopy is good when you want something active but brief — a few minutes of focused flow. Decant is good when you want to sit with something, think, and feel the satisfaction of a problem solved. Neither game serves both moods well, but together they give the site a range it wouldn't have with just one.
A collection also creates the right incentive structure for building. With a single game, every decision carries enormous weight — a mechanic that doesn't work represents a significant portion of the whole product. With a collection, a game that doesn't land as well as hoped is still just one game among several. This makes it easier to take risks, try things, and add games that are genuinely experimental rather than playing it safe every time.
The downside is that building a catalogue takes longer than building one thing. Woodyn currently has two games. That will grow, but slowly — because the bar for adding something to the catalogue is that it has to genuinely earn its place, not just exist.
What I'm Hoping For
The honest answer is that I'm not sure how this works out. The free browser game market is not one where a small, carefully made collection naturally finds a large audience. The distribution mechanics favor volume, SEO-optimized content, and viral loops — none of which are particularly compatible with "build things carefully and see what happens."
But I think there's a real audience for games that treat players with some respect. People who want something to play during a lunch break without being sold to. People who like puzzles but are tired of every good puzzle game being gatekept behind a subscription. People who remember what it felt like to just go to a website and play a game without friction.
Woodyn is built for those people. I'm one of them. That feels like a good enough place to start.
— The Woodyn devlog will continue with notes on specific games, mechanics, and decisions as they happen. The next post covers how Canopy was built — read it here.