Build a music guessing game that's simple enough to understand in five seconds but addictive enough to keep you playing for an hour. Oh, and do it without licensing a massive music catalogue.
The concept: five tracks play for 20 seconds each. Recognise the song? Hit pause and guess. The faster you guess, the more points you score. Simple premise, surprisingly tricky execution.
The Spotify API does the heavy lifting for the music—we pull track previews rather than hosting audio ourselves, which neatly sidesteps the licensing headache. The game logic lives in a Laravel API that handles playlists, scoring, and leaderboards.
The frontend is Next.js, chosen for its snappy page transitions and the ability to make the whole thing feel like a native app. Audio handling in the browser is fiddly—different browsers treat autoplay differently, and mobile Safari has its own opinions about everything. We spent more time on audio edge cases than we'd like to admit.
The scoring system rewards quick recognition but doesn't punish cautious players too harshly. Get it wrong and you lose points, but not so many that one bad guess ruins your game. The balance took iteration.
People play it at office parties. People play it on long car journeys. The viral loop is built in—you finish a game and immediately want to challenge someone else.
It's the kind of side project that reminds you why you got into this business in the first place. Sometimes you just want to build something fun.
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