Old hardware
No engine overhead and no shader pipeline, so a game keeps a steady frame rate on a device that is several years old.
Where these games are played
Built for the phone people actually have, not the one in the advert.
A game that only runs well on current hardware is a game that most of its audience cannot play. Everything in this catalogue is built to a budget that assumes an older device, a small screen and a connection the player is paying for.
Small screens first
Layouts are designed at phone dimensions and widened afterwards, not the other way round.
Measured in kilobytes
A whole game is smaller than a single photograph, so starting one costs the player almost nothing.
The budget
What every game is built to.
- One file, under thirty kilobytes, with no separate assets to fetch.
- No network request while playing, so it works offline and costs no data.
- Playable with one thumb, with no control that requires a mouse or a hover.
- Legible at a small screen size, with no text that requires zooming.
- A stable frame rate on hardware that is several years old, because that is what most of the audience carries.
Data cost is a design constraint
On a metered connection, every kilobyte a game fetches is a kilobyte the player paid for. That is why nothing here streams audio, downloads textures or checks in with a server. The whole game arrives once and then works, which is also what makes it playable on a train.
Screen size is not a scaling problem
Shrinking a desktop layout produces a game that is technically visible on a phone and unpleasant to play on one. The games here are laid out from the phone upwards: touch targets sized for a thumb, nothing important near the screen edge, and no reliance on precision a finger cannot deliver.
Offline is a feature, not a fallback
Because there is nothing to fetch, an interrupted connection does not interrupt a game. Scores are stored locally, so a player who loses signal mid-run loses nothing except the run itself. This is a consequence of the one-file rule rather than something bolted on afterwards.
Try one on the device in your pocket
Open any game on a phone, on a bad connection, and see how long it takes to start. That is the whole test.