I know myself by now. I sit down to "just quickly try something out," and three evenings later there's a thing nobody planned for. This time it's OtterSlide: a little otter swimming up a river, chasing another otter it very obviously adores — and never quite catching it.
Give it a go yourself — free in the browser, no sign-up (arrow keys, or tap left/right):
It started as a finger exercise
I really just wanted to try Flutter with the Flame game engine. Not a platformer, not a Flappy clone — something built around a character. An otter that shows emotion, plays with a pebble, flails when it smacks into a beaver dam. The idea: the score isn't the game, the little story is — the otter that never gives up.
AI in content creation is genuinely absurd right now
What impressed me more than the game itself was how far AI has come at everything around it. The otter art, the share images, the store assets, a wordless story concept for a short video — things that used to take days and a fistful of tools now happen in minutes.
The wild part isn't that AI can do it. It's how much it collapses the distance between "an idea" and "a thing I can actually look at." You think something — and moments later you can judge it, instead of imagining it.
The catch: AI is brilliant at the first 80%. The last 20% — taste, consistency, the honest "does this actually feel right?" — is still your job. And that's the part that decides whether it's any good.
The genuinely hard part: making it fun
The code wasn't the problem. The hard part was game feel — the difficulty. And it's a narrow ledge:
- Too easy → boring, you quit after 20 seconds.
- Too hard or unfair → you bail too early, frustrated.
- Just right → that "damn, I was so close — one more try."
That "so close" is the entire goal, and it was surprisingly hard to hit. My first attempt modeled the current as something you "settle into" — predictable, dull. The fix came from the old Flappy Bird trick: a constant force you fight against (the current acts like gravity), short deliberate taps, momentum, near-misses.
One rule was non-negotiable: death must never feel random. The current is always visible — you can see where it's pulling you. If you lose, it was you, not luck. That's the whole difference between "again" and "I'm out."
Just give it a go
OtterSlide is free, runs in the browser, and needs no sign-up: otterslide.app.
It's not finished — games never are. But it's fun, and that was the whole point. Let's see how far you get the little otter. 🦦
