Guides & articles
Tips for playing better, a bit of arcade history, and notes on how some of the games here were made. If you only read one, make it the Missile Command guide: it will change how you play Skyguard. Everything here is short enough to read between two rounds of a game.
Playing better
Background reading
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The arcade classics that inspired our games
Space Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Command, Breakout and Snake, and the game on this site each one led to.
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Why one-button games are secretly the hardest
Easy to learn in seconds, hard to get good at. Why fewer controls often means more skill.
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What makes a great daily puzzle game
One puzzle a day, the same for everyone. Why that works so well.
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How browser games stopped needing plugins
From Flash to today's browsers: what changed, and what got lost on the way.
How the games were made
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Strata: how a small mining game became 1,400 metres deep
From a test of whether digging feels good to a world that resets every Monday.
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The number that decides whether a track is fair
The two numbers that stop Redline from generating crashes you couldn't avoid.
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How we generate a mine that's fair for everybody
Why everyone in Strata digs the same world each week.
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How browser game leaderboards get cheated — and what we do about it
The common tricks, and why our servers keep score instead of your browser.
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How a daily puzzle picks its answer
Where Huedle's colour of the day comes from, and why it's never stored anywhere.
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The one number that made our survival game work
How a compass that gets less reliable made Castaway tense.
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Designing a game you can't see
Making Sonar, where the screen is black until you ping.
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Accessibility in arcade games — an honest audit of our own
What helps, and where our own games still fall short.