Cozy Coast

An idle fishing game that lives as a borderless widget in the corner of your screen, built solo in Electron and Phaser.

Solo developer

Electron Phaser TypeScript Steamworks
Live

A game that sits in the corner of your screen

Cozy Coast is a small idle fishing game shaped like a desktop widget. It is a borderless window that sits in front of or behind whatever you are actually working on, and it keeps fishing while you do. There are no timers to beat and no way to fall behind. Close it and offline progress keeps ticking, then tells you what happened while you were away.

It shipped to Steam Early Access on 14 August 2026 for Windows and macOS, built by one person.

The Cozy Coast widget at night: an angler on a wooden dock casting into the sea, a lit torch on the sand, a seagull, and the coin and catch-rate counters along the top
The widget after dark. It keeps fishing at full rate while it sits behind your other windows.

Fishing with friends

Stepping off the dock opens a hub village. Host one and invite friends straight from Steam, or browse the open hubs and join somebody else’s. Everyone walks the same village, sees each other move, and wears the outfit they picked.

There are no servers behind it. Steam holds the lobby list, brokers the connections and relays packets when a direct route is not available, and the host relays player positions to everyone else.

The Cozy Coast hub village with three anglers, a party list in the top left showing Angler, Rebecca and Falco with kick and ban controls, name plates above each character, and a notice reading Rebecca joined your hub
The hub, with the party list, name plates and join notice. The buildings are placeholders while the kitchen, crops and bar get built.

What you do

  • Four waters to fish: sea, deep sea, pond and deep pond, each with its own fish pool and rod-tier gate
  • An almanac to fill, sorted from common up to a new exotic tier that only opens past the Aurora Rod
  • A skill tree across three branches, Tideline, Stillwater and Shorecraft
  • A shop with buy, sell, a scrapyard for salvage, and a forge that turns material into trinkets
  • Character creation, a wardrobe, an effects tab for auras, and treasure chests that wash up on the sand
The Cozy Coast almanac open beside the wooden main menu, showing sea fish including Mackerel, Atlantic Bass, Pollock, Tuna and Lionfish, with uncaught species blacked out
The almanac. Uncaught fish stay as silhouettes, and some only bite at night.
The Cozy Coast skill tree showing the Tideline and Stillwater branches, with nodes such as steady hands, sharp eye, deep lure, patient float and ripple reader, some locked behind milestones
The skill tree. Points arrive with levels, and the deeper nodes are gated behind milestones.

How it is built

Electron for the shell, because the product is a desktop widget first and a game second. Phaser draws the coast inside it. TypeScript runs across the main process, the renderer, and the message types shared between them.

It runs zero servers. Steam hosts the lobbies, Steam Cloud holds the saves, and those saves are encrypted with a key derived from the Steam ID, so they are neither casually editable nor portable between accounts. One packaging pipeline produces both platforms, into a single Steam build carrying a depot per operating system.

Let's connect.

Always happy to talk shop, compare notes, or just say hi. Email or LinkedIn is the fastest way to reach me.

Get in touch