Behind the games
How a notebook doodle becomes a video game
No big game engine, no template. Every game is its own custom-built web page — its own code, its own pixel art, its own rules — designed, drawn, and tested at the kitchen table. Here’s how that actually works.
One game, one file
Each game on the shelf is a single, self-contained HTML file. All of the artwork, the sounds, the physics, and the logic live in that one page. There’s no separate download, no app store, and no install — when you open a game, the whole thing arrives at once and runs in your browser. That’s a deliberate constraint. It keeps the games fast to load, easy to share with a link, and simple to maintain: if something needs fixing, there’s exactly one place to fix it.
It also keeps us honest. When everything has to fit in a single file that a phone can load instantly, you can’t hide behind giant assets or bloated frameworks. You draw what you need, write what you need, and cut everything else.
Pixel art with a purpose
All of the art is drawn in a chunky, retro Game Boy Color style — big pixels, bold shapes, a limited palette. That’s partly nostalgia and partly practical: simple, readable shapes are exactly what a small screen and a young player need. A trash can should look like a trash can at a glance. A raccoon should read as “bandit” from its mask alone. Every character is built out of little rectangles placed on purpose, and the whole arcade shares the same look so it feels like one place.
Our favourite example: Dr. Calamity, the villain of Build & Survive. He began as a child’s felt-tip drawing — a tall square body, a stripe of hair shooting straight up, two angry eyebrows, a frown, arms out to the sides, and a little robot next to him. We rebuilt that drawing pixel by pixel so the in-game scientist matches the sketch that inspired him. No stock art could ever do that.
Why every game is short
A round of a Hank’s Game lasts somewhere between thirty seconds and a few minutes, and that’s by design. Short games respect your time and a kid’s attention span. They’re easy to fit into the gap before dinner, easy to hand off between players, and — crucially — they invite a rematch. A two-minute game with a high-score board is one of the most replayable things you can build: you always feel like you could do a little better next time. Pizza Stan gives you exactly two minutes to make as much money as you can. Raccoon Raider is a race to fill the trash truck as fast as possible. The clock is part of the fun.
Controls made for small hands
We design the controls for the youngest player first. On a touchscreen that usually means a big on-screen thumb-stick on the left and one clear action button on the right — move and blast, and nothing else to remember. In the city-builder it’s even simpler: you just tap a plot of land to build on it. Menus are big, text is minimal, and there’s always an obvious way back to the arcade.
Getting this right on phones took real work. Mobile browsers love to “help” by zooming when you touch two buttons at once, or by sliding the toolbar around under your thumbs. We spent a good while making sure that holding the joystick and the fire button at the same time drives the bike instead of pinch-zooming the page.
Tuning by handing over the phone
The single most valuable tool in the workshop is a seven-year-old play-tester. We can guess whether a level is fair, but the honest answer comes from watching someone actually play it. That’s how Raccoon Raider went from “too easy, everyone gets the same time” to a real challenge: the raccoons now eat trash in under a second and come at the cans from every direction, so you have to intercept them instead of strolling over. It’s how Build & Survive grew a proper economy where your workers have to staff businesses and build at the same time, instead of a boring loop where you just spam one building. Real players find the boring parts fast.
A leaderboard that keeps nothing personal
Every game shares one small high-score service running on a bit of cloud plumbing. When you finish a run, your time (or your money, in Pizza Stan) is compared against everyone else’s. If you crack the top ten, you type in three initials. That’s the only thing stored — three letters and a number. No names, no emails, no accounts, no tracking. The visitor and “games played” counters at the bottom of the home page work the same way: they count anonymously, with nothing personal attached. On a site meant for kids, that restraint isn’t an afterthought — it’s a design rule.
Never really finished
A game going on the shelf isn’t the end of it. We keep adding levels, redrawing art, and rebalancing the parts that don’t feel right. Pizza Stan’s rival now fights back on price. Raccoon Raider grew a creek with a bridge you have to cross. Each game’s own page lists what’s changed over time, because a game that keeps getting better is more fun to come back to.