A mouse game is not awkward on a phone. It's dead.
· 4 min read
Salt & Stone was built for a mouse, and on a phone nothing moved. The three things a finger doesn't have, and the one CSS line without which none of the rest works.
Writing
Notes from building the games on this site: what worked, what a portal actually checks, and the things that only turn up once something is live.
An AI teammate should say it's an AI
· 4 min read
Strandbreak Online fills an empty squad with a computer-controlled ally. Three rules decide when it appears, when it leaves, and why its name always ends in (AI).
The aiming line that was off by a factor of 17
· 4 min read
ScaleSling's dotted trajectory never came down, at any angle or power. The bug was one exponent, and finding it changed how we test every physics game.
Flat armour, and the difficulty cliff it hides
· 4 min read
In Briarlight Defense armour subtracts a fixed amount from every hit. That one rule makes poison matter, makes a stream the best spot on the map, and turned a small nerf into a wall.
33 sound effects and not one audio file
· 4 min read
Strandbreak Online ships no audio at all. Every sound is computed when the game starts, and the real benefit wasn't the download size: it was being able to test sound.
Thirty percent a minute is a promise you can't keep
· 4 min read
Husktide's brief asked for enemy health to grow 30% every minute. Compounded over a 30-minute run that is 2,600 times. How the curve got fixed without losing the feel.
Why our forts fell down on their own
· 4 min read
Towers in ScaleSling collapsed before the first shot. It wasn't the physics engine: it was 24 pairs of blocks born inside each other, and a body scaled twice.
A physics puzzle a five-year-old can aim
· 2 min read
ScaleSling has a slingshot like every game in its genre, and a second control that a small child can use. Getting the second one right took a rewrite.
Shipping a management game with no art files
· 3 min read
Salt & Stone is an isometric town-builder with no image, audio or font files at all. What that costs, what it buys, and where it stops working.
Naming a browser game when every good name is taken
· 2 min read
In a crowded genre the name is the SEO strategy. Three of our nine games were renamed at least once, and one took four tries.
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