After ten years of writing backends in Go, I wanted to try something different. Not just a different language or framework, but a completely different type of challenge. I wanted to take a simple idea and implement it start-to-finish with focus on user experience, design and animations.
The result is “How Low Can You Go?” – a web-based daily number challenge.
How Low Can You Go presents a deceptively simple challenge: pick the lowest number and win. The obvious move is 1, and many players will think exactly that.
Here’s the twist: if two or more players pick the same number, they’re all eliminated.
Suddenly, that 1 becomes a dangerous gamble. This is where strategy meets psychology — go too obvious and risk elimination, play it too safe and lose the win. Every day brings a fresh mental duel.
What makes this fascinating from a game theory perspective is the layered decision-making. Players aren’t just picking a number – they’re predicting human behavior, weighing risk against reward, and trying to outsmart a crowd while avoiding the same traps everyone else might fall into. Each day becomes a mini-experiment in collective psychology.
I wanted the game to be genuinely pleasant to look at and interact with, not just functional. I used a vintage design inspired by retro cartoons, added animations and micro-interactions throughout, and applied noise overlays to give UI elements a textured feel.
I’m not a designer, so I can’t fully judge if I succeeded. Here are some screenshots of the UI:
On the technical side, I chose Nuxt and Supabase. The reasons were practical:
- I wanted to try one of these modern stacks people are talking about
- I already had some experience with Vue
- I wanted to focus on UI, not on writing API servers or configuring deployments. With Nuxt, I got zero-configuration deploys straight to Cloudflare Workers
Overall, I like this stack. It lets you bootstrap projects very quickly, especially if you’re using an existing design system or UI kit. With Supabase, you get working authentication almost for free. You can mostly avoid writing traditional backend code and move logic to database views, functions and RLS. But this requires extra care – one wrong move and your entire database could be exposed to the public.
I’ve just launched this challenge and haven’t yet tried to actively promote it. I think to be really interesting from mathematical standpoint it needs at least 100 daily players. Right now it has fewer.
If you’re curious, you can try it out at golow.app. Each game runs for 24 hours, so there’s no pressure to play immediately – just pick a number you think will be uniquely low and see how your intuition matches up against everyone else’s. And if you find it interesting, sharing it with friends would help turn this into the social experiment I think it could become.
I learned a lot along the way and built several nice abstractions I’ll likely reuse in future projects. I might write more about some of the technical insights I gathered. But for now, I’m just happy to have built something outside my comfort zone that actually feels good to use and to look at.