Designing an arcade that doesn't look like every other arcade
Browser-game portals have a look: neon green on black, a wall of thumbnails, seventeen ad slots elbowing the games. We wanted the opposite â a small arcade that feels like a well-lit indie game shop, not a casino floor.
Start from the studio's palette, then dim the lights
Our studio brand lives in sage and terracotta. For the arcade we kept the terracotta â it's the color of Sky Runner's little plane â and set it against a deep navy (#111827) with a sky-blue accent. Dark backgrounds do two jobs here: game art pops against them, and the page reads instantly as "evening, fun" instead of "office, forms."
Cards that behave like cabinets
Each game is a card with a 16:9 illustration, a title, a one-line pitch, and a status badge. The live badge pulses gently; hover scales the card by exactly 2% with a blue glow. Restraint is the trick â one hover effect, applied consistently, beats five competing animations.
Every thumbnail is inline SVG
No screenshot JPEGs. Each card's artwork is a small hand-written SVG scene of the actual game â Sky Runner's card contains its toy city, blimp, and red drone as vector shapes. SVG thumbnails are a few kilobytes, razor-sharp on every screen density, and they let the whole homepage load in a single request. Before the newer games shipped, their cards showed deliberately blurred "wireframe" SVGs â a teaser mechanic that cost us nothing and made the coming-soon cards feel alive.
Details that carry the mood
- CSS-only clouds drift across the hero â three blurred rounded rectangles on a 30â55s animation loop. Zero images, zero JavaScript.
- Layered radial gradients give the hero depth: a warm glow upper-right, a cool one lower-left, and a faint diagonal pinstripe so the navy never reads as flat black.
- Inter, three weights. One typeface family across hub and games keeps the arcade feeling like one place.
The result loads in well under a second, works from a phone in one hand, and doesn't look like anyone else's arcade. See it on the homepage â and if your business site deserves the same treatment, that's literally our job.