How to play luvbubl
luvbubl is a bubble sandbox. There is no goal, no score to beat and nothing to unlock — you pick a bubble machine, choose how the world behaves, and play. The controls sit along the bottom of the playground above, and everything below explains what each one actually does.
The basics
Bubbles drift up from the bottom of the screen on their own. Click or tap a bubble to pop it — each pop bursts into particles and makes a sound pitched to the bubble's size: tiny bubbles ping high, giant ones thud low. Clicking empty space spawns a new bubble wherever you clicked.
The counters in the top-right corner track how many bubbles are on screen and how many you have popped in total. Confetti and a chime fire at 25, 50, 100, 200, 500 and 1,000 pops. Nothing is saved between visits, so every session starts fresh.
Bubble machines
The machine decides how bubbles arrive and how big they are. Only one runs at a time.
- 🪄 Wand
- Nothing spawns on its own. Hold the pointer down and drag to draw a trail of small bubbles wherever you move — the closest thing to a brush.
- 🌀 Fan
- A calm, steady stream of small-to-medium bubbles. The default, and the best one to leave running in the background.
- 💨 Blower
- Fewer but much larger bubbles, up to about four times the size of the fan's.
- 🚀 Mega
- Giant bubbles in bursts of two or three at a time. They fill the screen quickly and merge into even bigger ones.
Shapes and colours
Shape is multi-select — this is the control people miss most often. Turn on classic, heart, star, square and hexagon together and each new bubble picks one at random, so you get a mixed stream rather than all one kind. You cannot switch every shape off; at least one always stays active.
The five colour palettes change the hue range new bubbles are drawn from: rainbow uses the full spectrum, ocean stays in blues and teals, sunset in reds through oranges, forest in greens and yellows, and mono drops saturation entirely for pale greys. Changing the palette only affects bubbles spawned afterwards — the ones already floating keep their colour.
Gravity
The gravity button cycles through three worlds, and it changes the feel of the playground more than any other control.
- ⬆️ Up
- The default. Bubbles rise from the bottom and drift off the top, wobbling as they go.
- ⬤ Zero-G
- No pull in any direction. Bubbles drift on their own momentum and bounce off all four walls, so the screen slowly fills with a slow-motion collision field.
- ⬇️ Down
- Bubbles fall from the top and bounce off the floor, losing energy each time until they settle into a pile.
Tools
🧲 Magnet
Hold anywhere to pull every nearby bubble toward your pointer. Useful for gathering a crowd into one place before popping them, or for herding big bubbles together so they merge.
🌬️ Blow
Hold and sweep to push bubbles away in the direction you are moving. The force scales with how fast you sweep, and faint rings show the wind. Magnet and blow are mutually exclusive — turning one on switches the other off.
💥 Pop All
Clears the screen in a cascade rather than all at once, popping faster the more bubbles are left. It is the most satisfying button on the page.
🎯 Challenge
A 30-second timed run. Pop as many bubbles as you can by hand — only manual pops count, and bubble spawning by clicking is disabled so you cannot game the score. The timer turns red for the last five seconds.
Bubbles that merge
Two bubbles that overlap closely for long enough can fuse into a single larger one, with the new radius calculated so the combined area is preserved. It is deliberately rare and slightly random, so a crowded screen slowly grows a few giants rather than instantly collapsing into one. Merged bubbles also get a longer lifespan.
Questions
Is it free?
Yes, entirely. There is nothing to buy and no paid tier. The site is supported by advertising.
Do I need an account?
No. There is no sign-up, no login and no profile. luvbubl has no user accounts of any kind.
Does it work on a phone or tablet?
Yes — every control is touch-driven, and tapping, dragging for the wand, and holding for the magnet and blow tools all work the same way they do with a mouse. On a small screen the control panel wraps onto more rows, which leaves the playground a little shorter.
Is my progress saved?
No. The pop counter and milestones reset every time you reload. luvbubl stores nothing on your device and has no server to store anything on.
Why is there sound, and can I turn it off?
Every pop is generated live in the browser with the Web Audio API — there are no sound files to download. Use the speaker button in the top-right to mute. Browsers block audio until you interact with the page, so the first pop is silent on some devices.
Is it suitable for children?
There is no violence, no chat, no text input and no way to contact anyone through the site. It is not directed at children under 13, and it is not designed as a children's product — see the privacy policy for how advertising works here.
It runs slowly. What can I do?
Physics runs on every bubble on screen, so the mega machine plus zero-G gravity is the heaviest combination there is. Hit Pop All to clear the screen, or switch to the fan machine. Collision checks are already capped so the frame rate degrades gently rather than falling off a cliff.
How it is built
Everything you see is drawn into a single HTML5 canvas element and simulated from scratch — velocity, wobble, drag, wall bounces, elastic collisions and merging are all hand-written, with no physics or game engine involved. The interface is React and the whole thing is a static site with no backend. There is more about that on the about page.