Writing
Notes from building a browser game. Design decisions with the reasoning left in, performance work with the numbers, and marketing claims we went and checked.
What happens in the first two minutes
A minute-by-minute account of episode one — the rocks, the first thing that shoots back, and the transmission that arrives at eighty-six seconds.
· 4 min
The ship that costs three rupees and has no gun
Four escort ships, one to four rupees each. One of them has no weapon at all, and that is the most deliberate thing on the price list.
· 4 min
The stars get brighter the further out you go
Seven skies between Earth and Pluto. Each has less background and more stars than the last, and nothing in the game ever announces the change.
· 5 min
You cannot lose anything by dying
Most games take something when you fail. Here the whole penalty is that a repair button lights up, and the repair is free and one tap away.
· 4 min
AI called our paid game free. The llms.txt fix
Gemini said our paid game was free. Our own llms.txt and structured data caused it. The exact fixes, and the three shapes that mislead an extractor.
· 5 min
A browser game that saves progress, no account
Browser games can save your progress with no account at all. Here is the data model that does it, what it costs, and the limitation we chose to keep.
· 5 min
Play a real game without downloading anything
No download, no signup, no store page. Open a tab and you are playing. What browser games can finally do, what they cannot, and the numbers behind both.
· 4 min