Play a real game without downloading anything

Astrototo is a game you play in a browser tab. No download, no app store, no account. You tap a link and it starts — go and fly one episode, then come back if you want to know why that works now and did not before.

Because "you can play games in your browser" has been technically true and practically useless for twenty years. It was true of Flash portals. It was true of the WebGL demos nobody finished. Here is what actually changed, with the numbers we have — and, more usefully, what still does not work.

Why browser games are not a compromise any more

The honest answer is that nothing dramatic happened recently. Several ordinary things became reliable at the same time.

Vector art collapsed the download. Our entire art direction is twenty path strings — every ship, every rock, every planet is one SVG path drawn in one colour, and the game ships no images at all. That is not an aesthetic choice that happens to be small. The smallness is what makes an instant-start game possible in the first place.

The page weighs about 800 KB of uncompressed JavaScript, which is the part that actually costs a player time, and there is no asset bundle behind it waiting to download.

And the simulation is not the constraint. We measured ours headlessly — no canvas attached, so this is the game logic alone — at roughly 9 microseconds per step, with ten friendly ships against eighteen hostiles, against a 16,600 microsecond frame budget. Three orders of magnitude of headroom in the part people assume is the bottleneck.

Note what that measurement does not say. It says nothing about rendering, because nothing was drawn. We have not published a frame-time number yet, and until we do, anyone telling you Canvas 2D is definitely fast enough for your game — us included — is reasoning rather than measuring.

What a browser game still cannot do

This is the more useful half.

Storage is not permanent, and no amount of engineering fixes it. We save your progress on a server with no signup, so a voyage survives a reload, a new tab and a closed browser — but clear your site data and it is gone. Why we accepted that, and why device fingerprinting was the wrong fix, is a post of its own.

Sign-in inside an in-app browser is a real risk. Open a link from a social app and you land in an embedded webview. Google's OAuth policy disallows sign-in from embedded browsers, so anything gated behind an account can be unreachable for a large share of arrivals. We have designed around that rather than measured it on a real device — that test is still outstanding, and the anonymous path exists precisely so the first two minutes never depend on the answer.

A browser game also gives up every re-engagement tool an app has. No home screen icon, no push notification, no store listing surfacing you to someone who is browsing. We have not solved that. It is the real cost of this bet, and we would rather say so than pretend the trade was free.

Why we made this one download-free

The pitch is a three-hour voyage from Earth to Pluto, played two minutes at a time. That only works if starting costs nothing.

An install is a store page, a download, a permissions prompt, and an icon you have to justify keeping. Each of those is a place to stop. A link that opens a game is a different proposition: deciding to try it and playing it are the same gesture.

So the rule we hold above the others is that play starts in one tap, with no signup, no email and no popup. Not because friction is unfashionable, but because the first two minutes are the whole argument, and anything placed in front of them costs more than any amount of copy earns back.

Eight episodes exist so far, out of the sixty-eight the route currently plans. The voyage is being built in the open, and the part that is finished is the part you can play right now.

Start in the tab you are already in. Nothing stands between the link and the first episode.