Dev Log

How the arcade gets built

Build notes, design decisions, and live experiments — written as we go, by the team that writes the code.

Build Notes · 2026-07-20

Neon Breaker build notes: brick-breaker physics in one evening-sized file

How we built Neon Breaker: paddle-angle steering, choosing the bounce axis from overlap depth, combo multipliers, and a synthwave look done entirely in canvas.

Build Notes · 2026-07-20

Tile Fuse build notes: the mystery puzzle was a merge game all along

How we built Tile Fuse, our sliding merge puzzle: grid logic that resists edge-case bugs, DOM tiles versus canvas, animation timing, and honest swipe detection.

Philosophy · 2026-07-19

Why our games ship with no frameworks, no trackers, and no downloads

The engineering philosophy behind the arcade: vanilla JavaScript, single-file games, a first-party counter instead of analytics suites, and pages lighter than a photo.

Experiment · 2026-07-16

We pointed a 1.2-million-follower Facebook page at one small browser game

Field notes from a live traffic experiment: sending posts from a large Facebook page to Sky Runner, measuring with a first-party counter, and what link truncation taught us.

Design · 2026-07-14

Designing an arcade that doesn't look like every other arcade

The design system behind onesmallgame.com: a deep-navy base, terracotta and sky-blue accents, CSS-only clouds, and why every thumbnail is inline SVG.

Build Notes · 2026-07-13

Building Sky Runner: a canvas endless-flyer in plain JavaScript

How we built Sky Runner, our 90-second browser flying game — one canvas, one file, no engine — and what we learned about difficulty curves and touch controls.