about

Doodly is a daily doodle game where you watch a simple drawing animate itself on screen, and then try to recreate it from memory with your finger or mouse. You have 20 seconds per doodle, no eraser, no undo, and your attempts end up side-by-side with everyone else's in a shared leaderboard. Failure is the feature — the joy is in how badly we all butcher the same thing.

the doodles

Every reference doodle in Doodly comes from Google's Quick, Draw! dataset, a collection of ~50 million drawings made by people around the world playing a web game called Quick, Draw!. Google released the dataset under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which means anyone can use, share, and remix the drawings — including commercial use — as long as credit is given. We hand-pick 20 universally-recognizable categories (cat, dog, pizza, tree, etc.), sample around 80 recognizable drawings from each, and ship them as static JSON. We do not modify or claim authorship of any drawing.

Full attribution: the Quick, Draw! Dataset © 2017 Google, Inc., licensed under CC-BY 4.0. Original dataset and source code available at github.com/googlecreativelab/quickdraw-dataset.

the tech

Doodly is a small Next.js app. The drawing, smoothing, and scoring all run in your browser — no data leaves your device until you choose to share a room. Scoring is a chamfer-distance comparison between your drawing and the reference, pre-aligned by bounding box, and runs on a 96×96 pixel grid. No AI, no machine learning, no tracking.

who built this

Doodly is built and operated by Harish Narayanan. Feedback, bug reports, and deletion requests: zuleart.shop@gmail.com.