Quiet Pond

A quiet corner of the internet

Quiet Pond is a tiny, wordless browser game about slowing down. There's no score, no timer and no way to lose — just a small koi pond that reacts to your touch. Every tap sends real ripples spreading across the surface, and if you tap twice you'll see the two waves cross and interfere, exactly the way water does. Drop a little food and the nearest fish will turn and drift over to nibble it, leaving a soft splash behind.

The whole thing is drawn live, frame by frame, using nothing but the HTML canvas built into your browser. No images, no audio files, no game engine, no download — the water, the fish and the starlit night sky are all generated in code as you watch. It runs fully on your device, so once the page has loaded you can even go offline and keep drifting. It's meant to be the sort of thing you open for ninety seconds between tasks, breathe out, and close again.

What the koi are actually doing

Each fish carries a heading, a cruising speed and a wander timer. With nothing in the water it re-rolls a small course change — up to about a quarter of a radian either way — every one and a half to four seconds, and drifts at a little over half its top speed. The moment a pellet lands, every fish scans the pellet list, picks the nearest one and points its desired heading straight at it. Chasing raises the target speed to roughly 1.25× the fish's base and nearly doubles how quickly it can swing that heading around, which is why a feeding koi visibly banks harder than a drifting one. It never snaps to the new angle: the heading is eased toward the target a fraction per frame, so every turn comes out as an arc.

Two other forces bend that arc. Any other fish within about sixty pixels contributes a separation vector, mixed into the steering at eighteen percent, which is what stops all four from stacking up on the same pellet. Within sixty pixels of the edge of the world the fish is nudged back toward the middle at ten percent — a hint rather than a wall, with a hard reflect a few pixels further out as a backstop. Once a fish is within roughly ten pixels of a pellet it nibbles: the pellet's remaining life is cut to almost nothing, a few pale flecks pop off, and a strong disturbance is stamped into the water. Pellets nobody reaches fade after eight seconds.

The water underneath all of that is a 220 × 124 grid of heights held in two float arrays. On each step every cell takes the average of its four neighbours' current heights, subtracts its own older value, and multiplies the result by a damping factor of 0.962. That subtraction is the whole trick: it is what makes a disturbance travel outward as a wave instead of just blurring in place, and it is why two taps genuinely interfere — crests add where they meet and cancel where a peak lands on a trough, with none of that special-cased anywhere in the code. A press stamps a strength of 340 into a three-by-three patch of cells; dragging stamps 130. The grid is then shaded purely by its own slope, the left-neighbour-minus-right-neighbour difference weighted about twice as heavily as the vertical one, painted into a small offscreen bitmap and stretched across the canvas. Swimming fish add a faint disturbance of 14 behind them. That is the wake.

Day, dusk and night are three sets of numbers

The time-of-day band does not swap in artwork. Each of the three settings is a small table: a surface colour, a deeper bottom colour, a highlight, the strength of the reflected sun or moon column, whether stars are on, how dark the ink outline around each fish is, and how brightly the fish are lit. Day runs a pale green-grey surface over blue-green depths with no reflected column at all and the fish at full brightness. Dusk drops an orange surface over a plum bottom and turns the column up to its strongest. Night is nearly black, keeps the column at three-quarters, dims the fish to sixty percent and switches the stars on. The pond deliberately opens on Night.

The column itself is a vertical band down the centre, about six percent of the width to either side, and its brightness is modulated by the local horizontal slope — so when a ripple rolls through it, the reflection breaks up into fragments rather than staying a clean stripe. The star field is sixty points scattered across the upper seventy percent of the grid, about one in eight of them warm rather than white. Each star's horizontal position is offset by the ripple slope beneath it, which is why the stars shiver when a wave passes: they are reflections on a surface, not lights in a sky. Every value in the table is eased toward its target each frame, so a change takes a little under a second to complete rather than cutting. You can move between the three with the arrows in the band, by tapping one of the three dots, by swiping more than about forty pixels across the band, or by pressing T with the pond focused.

Nothing is being counted

The "Fed" number under the pond is a running total of pellets you have dropped this visit. It is not a score, it does not unlock anything, and it is not written anywhere — it lives in a variable and goes back to zero when you reload. The same goes for the time of day, the camera position and the state of the water: none of it is saved, and nothing is sent anywhere. There is no account, no leaderboard and nothing to come back for, which is the point. It is a surface that responds when you touch it and then carries on without you, and some people find that a pleasant way to spend a couple of minutes between other things.

If a number to chase is what you actually wanted, that is next door. The arcade is the half of the break room with scores and leaderboards in it, and Nemo Nemo Wizards sits at the far end of it — a full 3D voxel roguelike that wants a real session and a real keyboard rather than two minutes and one hand.