Arcade

Arcade is a small game portal I run for my friends. You pick a game, type a name, then play alone or open a room and share its code. Everything runs in the browser, on a computer or a phone, and online rooms play in real time.

The games

• Coop Strike: a pixel-art shooter where up to 4 players fight off waves of space chickens and a boss.
• Võ Lâm Liên Đấu: a martial-arts arena for up to 5 players, last one standing wins.
• Mochichi: a phone game where you tap to fly two cats past Tokyo towers and neon signs, alone or in a race for up to 6.
• Bầy Xác: up to 4 players hold out against 10 waves of zombies.
• Hoa Sơn Luận Kiếm: a fighting game with six fighters, for up to 4 players or against the computer.

Under the hood

• It is TypeScript all the way: the games are drawn with Phaser and built with Vite and Bun, and the portal page uses no framework.
• Each game's rules live in a simulation with no graphics or browser code in it, so in every online room the server runs the same code as the player's browser.
• Online rooms run on Nakama, a game server, over WebSocket, with PostgreSQL behind it and Caddy in front.
• In Coop Strike the server only sends what changed since the last update. In a 4-player boss fight, that cut each player's traffic from about 760 to about 90 kbit/s.

Playtesting

Friends played the games on their phones, starting with Coop Strike, and whatever they ran into decided what got fixed next.

• On one phone, the prompt to turn the phone sideways stayed on screen after it was turned. That same night the game started re-reading the screen size after a turn, got a button to play upright instead, and stopped taps on the prompt from reaching the buttons underneath.
• In Bầy Xác, a tester wanted to fire with a tap instead of a hold and to move with one hand while aiming with the other, and found the ammo hard to keep track of. On phones the game now starts with two sticks, a tap on the right half fires one shot, and an ammo count under the player warns when it is running low or empty.
• In Hoa Sơn Luận Kiếm, a tap made in the middle of a move only went through once the move ended, which felt sluggish. Now, there and in Võ Lâm Liên Đấu, a press that cannot start when it arrives is simply dropped.
• After that, phones came first. In tests on an emulated slow 4G phone, Bầy Xác answers the first input after about 0.6 s instead of 2.8 s, and after a simulated stall a player in Bầy Xác or Coop Strike is back in their seat in about 6 to 10 s instead of over a minute.

Art credit

The Hoa Sơn Luận Kiếm fighters in the pictures on this page are "Elementals" by chierit, used under CC BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) and modified.