Articles

Endless arcade games are the espresso shots of mobile gaming: one tap to start, no tutorial to sit through, and a score that only stops climbing when you slip. They've quietly become one of the most-played genres on phones precisely because they ask so little of you up…

When you're making a one-touch arcade game, there's a temptation to treat the controls as a solved problem. Tap, swipe, drag — pick one and get on to the fun stuff. We learned the slow way that for Glydra, the controls were the fun stuff. Get them wrong and nothing…

Every arcade game hands you a number that goes up. The good ones make that number feel worth fighting for. The difference almost never comes down to the points themselves — it comes from the small systems layered on top that turn a score into a series of dares. Here's…

"One-touch" is a genre that sounds like a limitation and works like a discipline. Strip a game down to a single input — one tap, one drag, one hold — and you remove every place to hide. There's no combo string to mask shallow design, no button layout to fiddle with.…

Merge puzzles in the Suika mold are quietly stressful games. You drop things into a jar, matching pairs combine into bigger things, and the whole time a tide of stuff is creeping toward the rim. Lose track for a few drops and it's over. We love the format, but we…

Idle games have a bit of a reputation, and not a flattering one. The genre is famous for number-go-up dopamine, push notifications nagging you back, and a shop happy to sell you the progress you were promised for free. We wanted to build an idle game we'd actually be…

Most puzzle games quietly assume you speak a particular language. Word games are the obvious case, but even a number puzzle usually leans on a wall of text to explain itself. We wanted to build something a player in São Paulo, Seoul or Stockholm could pick up and…

Hand a console game to a phone and the first thing that breaks is the controls. A thumbstick that felt precise under your thumb becomes a smudgy circle you can't feel, floating somewhere near the bottom-left of a screen your hand is also trying to see. Yet the…

Here's an uncomfortable truth about endless arcade games: most of your runs don't end because the game got too hard. They end because you stopped paying attention to how it was getting hard. Difficulty in these games is almost never random — it ramps on a schedule, and…

"Free-to-play" earned its bad reputation honestly. Most of us have rage-uninstalled a game that interrupted a good run with a thirty-second unskippable ad, or buried the fun behind a wall that conveniently sold you the way over it. So when we make free games — and ours…

If you follow mobile games at all, you've probably noticed the arcade and puzzle titles on the charts feel different than they did a couple of years ago. The five-minute, pure-reflex time-killer hasn't vanished, but it's quietly being replaced by something with a bit…

There's a specific frustration unique to arcade games: you know your high score is beatable — you set it, after all — but every run since has fallen just short, and the harder you try, the worse it gets. The good news is that beating your own best is less about talent…