What it took to make every game playable on a phone
Most of these games were designed at a desk with a keyboard. Making all of them properly playable on a phone, in both orientations, turned up problems we would not have guessed.
A browser game that technically runs on a phone and a browser game that is good on a phone are different things. In November we went through every game at the screen sizes of an iPhone SE, an iPhone 13 and a Pixel 7, upright and sideways, using touch only. The notes below are the things that turned out to matter, roughly in order of how much.
The game has to fit, and stay fitted
Held sideways, the game and its controls now fill the screen together, and the page lines the game up for you, including when you rotate the phone in the middle of a run. Held upright, the game sits directly under its title so it is on screen without scrolling. This sounds like layout trivia. It is the difference between playing and fighting the page.
Controls must not sit on top of the score
Pause, mute and fullscreen used to float over the corner of the game. On a desktop monitor that corner is spare. On a phone it is where the score is. Those buttons now live in a toolbar under the game, where nothing is underneath them.
Fullscreen on iPhone is a layout, not an API
Safari on iPhone does not let a page put one of its own elements into fullscreen. Rather than hide the button there, the game page builds the effect itself: it rearranges the page so the game fills the screen. The result is the same from the player's side, which is the only side that counts.
Say how to play by touch
Instructions written for a keyboard are useless on a phone, and worse, they make the game look broken. Each game now shows touch instructions on touch screens, and the controls sheet lists touch gestures first. Going through the instructions game by game also showed that several listed keys that did nothing, so the keyboard controls were corrected too.
The pause button should not lie
The arcade's pause button and the game's own idea of whether it was paused could drift apart, leaving a button that said Resume over a game that was already running. Every game now reports its pause state to the page, and the button follows the game rather than guessing.
Small screens found real bugs
Cramped layouts exposed mistakes that had nothing to do with phones. In Neon Hockey the computer player could pin the puck in a corner and freeze the match for good, in every mode. In its Breakout Blitz mode, bricks were losing health on every frame the puck touched them instead of once per hit. Stack Overflow's Architect Mode could not be won on a short sideways screen. All three are fixed, along with larger tap targets and heads-up text that no longer overlaps the play area across the catalog.
Updates have to actually arrive
VoltCade saves games on your device so they work offline. We found that saved games were never being refreshed, so returning players could be stuck on an old version indefinitely. Games now load from the saved copy immediately and update themselves in the background, so the next visit gets the fix.
None of this is glamorous. But plenty of people will only ever open the arcade on a phone, and for them these details are the product.