Work · Built in-house
We built a 16-bit shark game that weighs less than most website logos
Hammerhead Run is a 90-second, 16-bit-style browser game we built from scratch as a technical showcase. You play a great hammerhead on tropical sand flats, pulsing to find buried stingrays and pinning them before time runs out. The whole game is about 23 KB, and nothing loads until you press Play.
- Project
- Hammerhead Run
- Type
- Browser game, built in-house
- Built
- October 2026
- Play it
- jewelofthesea.agency/play/
Why we built it
We built Hammerhead Run from scratch: no game engine, no templates. Every sprite is drawn in code and every sound is synthesised in the browser. It's a technical showcase, because if we can build this, we can build what you imagine.
It also earns its place on a marketing site: it is something people share, and its end card offers a free SEO & AEO audit.
Play it here
Press Play and the game loads in place. Swim with the arrow keys or W A S D, press Space to pulse, and hold Space next to a revealed ray to pin it. On a phone, drag on the left half and press the right half.
How we built it
No engine. We measured a popular small game engine first: its minimum came to about 53 KB gzipped, more than our whole budget for the game, so we wrote it on the plain Canvas 2D API in strict TypeScript.
Art as text. Every sprite is written in the code as rows of palette numbers and drawn at start-up, in a 16-colour palette. There are no image files.
Sound made live. Every effect and the music loop are synthesised in the browser with the Web Audio API. There are no audio files.
Loads only when asked. The play page ships a poster drawn in CSS and a tiny script. The game itself is fetched only after you press Play.
Accessible. Keyboard, touch and gamepad controls, remappable keys, captions for sounds, a pause menu, and reduced motion when your device asks for it.
A new reef every day. The layout comes from the date, so everyone plays the same reef on the same day.
Results
The numbers
- ≈23 KB the whole game, gzipped: code, pixel art and sound
- ≈5 KB the play page before you press Play
- 0 image or audio files requested during play
- 100 / 100 / 100 / 100 Lighthouse Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO, with LCP around 0.8 s
- 60 fps under 4× CPU throttling, a stand-in for a mid-range phone
Measured October 2026 during development, on the game's own production build (Windows 10, headless Chromium, Lighthouse mobile emulation). We will re-measure on this live site.
Screens
