Guides·4 min read
How to Split the Cost of a Group Gift
The gift is rarely what goes wrong with a group present. The collection is.
◆ The journal
Notes from the
studio.
What a bespoke game costs, how a commission actually runs, and ideas for the occasions people most often build one for.
Guides·5 min read
What You Actually Get for £99
The cheapest tier is the one people assume is a token version. It is not, and the reason is worth explaining.
Guides·4 min read
When a Custom Game Is the Wrong Gift
We make these, so this is the article we have the least incentive to write. It is also the most useful one.
Guides·4 min read
Why Bespoke Work Costs What It Does
A commission has no second customer. That single fact explains almost the whole price.
Anniversaries·5 min read
Tenth Anniversary Gifts in the Busiest Decade
A tenth anniversary usually arrives in the middle of the hardest decade. Plan accordingly.
Birthdays·5 min read
16th Birthday Gifts for Someone Who Is Hard to Read
The risk at sixteen is not buying something boring. It is buying something for the person they were at fourteen.
Birthdays·6 min read
21st Birthday Gifts That Are Not Just Money in a Card
At 21 most people are between homes, between jobs and between phases. That is the actual gift problem.
Anniversaries·5 min read
Ruby Anniversary Gifts for Forty Years
By forty years the gift is almost never for the couple's benefit. It is the family saying something out loud.
Anniversaries·6 min read
Golden Anniversary Gifts for Fifty Years
A golden wedding is the last anniversary most families are certain of. That is worth planning around.
Birthdays·7 min read
80th Birthday Gifts When They Do Not Want More Things
Somebody turning 80 has spent a decade trying to get rid of things. A present should not undo that.
Birthdays·5 min read
90th Birthday Gifts That Are Actually Wanted
Nobody turning ninety needs anything. The question is what to give when that is genuinely true.
Anniversaries·7 min read
11 Anniversary Gifts for Your Parents
You know more about your parents than anybody buying them a gift, and you almost certainly buy them a plant.
Craft·5 min read
The Honest Way to Build Bespoke Games Repeatedly
Every commission is the same engine and none of them is the same game. This is how that is true rather than a sales line.
Guides·4 min read
Can You Put a Real Person in a Video Game?
Yes. The interesting questions are about permission and about what a likeness actually is.
Family·7 min read
12 Christening Gifts Worth Keeping for Twenty Years
A christening present is a message to somebody who does not exist yet. That is a strange brief and it has a good answer.
Corporate·6 min read
10 Client Gifts That Are Not Another Hamper
Your client received nine hampers in December. Two of them were from firms they cannot name.
Corporate·7 min read
12 Ways to Mark a Company Anniversary Without a Slideshow
Most company anniversaries are celebrated at the people who were there. Everybody else is watching a slideshow about strangers.
Corporate·7 min read
11 Conference Stand Ideas That Stop People Walking Past
Every stand at the show has a screen, a bowl of sweets and three people standing awkwardly. Two seconds to be different.
Guides·5 min read
Custom Game or Personalised Book: Which Suits Better?
A book is read to somebody. A game is played by them. That difference decides most of it.
Corporate·6 min read
11 Ways to Recognise Somebody Without a Certificate
Employee of the month is a scheme. Being told exactly what you did well, by name, is recognition.
Weddings·6 min read
11 Engagement Gifts for Before the Wedding List Exists
The whole difficulty of an engagement gift is that it arrives before anybody has decided anything.
Seasonal·6 min read
12 Father's Day Gifts Beyond Socks and Beer
Father's Day has almost no gift tradition, which is why the shops are full of novelty mugs.
Anniversaries·5 min read
First Anniversary Gifts When Paper Is the Tradition
Paper sounds like a thin tradition. It is the one that produces the things couples still have at their fortieth.
Craft·5 min read
Two of Our Games Contain No Sound Files at All
A tape screech, a sword clang, thunder rolling. No audio files involved in any of them.
Family·5 min read
Gifts From Grandchildren That Are Not a Handprint
Grandparents keep an astonishing amount. The question is what is worth them keeping.
Family·5 min read
Presents for a Child Who Already Has Everything
The toy cupboard is full and everything in it was wanted at the time. That is the whole problem.
Family·6 min read
12 Gifts for a Teenager Who Only Plays Games
Gaming is an interest with depth to it. The gift problem is not the hobby, it is not knowing anything about it.
Family·7 min read
12 Gifts for Someone Who Is Impossible to Buy For
Hard to buy for is not one problem. It is four, and they have different answers.
Family·7 min read
12 Graduation Gifts for Someone About to Move Six Times
A graduation present has to survive six house moves. That eliminates most of the list.
Weddings·6 min read
11 Groomsmen Gifts That Are Not Another Hip Flask
Every groomsman over thirty owns three engraved hip flasks and has used none of them.
Family·6 min read
15 Housewarming Gifts That Are Not a Candle
You are buying decoration for a room nobody has decided about yet. That is a difficult brief.
Craft·6 min read
How the Computer Decides Its Move in Our Chess Game
Four difficulty levels, one engine. The hardest problem was not making it strong, it was making it lose convincingly.
Craft·5 min read
How a Hit Is Made to Feel Like a Hit
Nothing in a game actually collides. An impact is four cheap effects fired in the right order.
Craft·5 min read
What a Game Draws First, and Why the Order Matters
There is no scene. There is a list of drawing instructions, run back to front, sixty times a second.
Craft·5 min read
How a Game Gets Its Colour Palette
A small palette is not a limitation left over from old hardware. It is what stops a player losing the character.
Craft·5 min read
Reading the Controls Properly
A game does not respond to a key being pressed. It asks, every frame, which keys are currently down. The difference is everything.
Craft·5 min read
Getting a Game's Volume Right
Every sound in our games passes through a single gain set to about a third. Everything else is decided against that.
Craft·5 min read
How a Game Remembers Where You Got To
Our adventure game saves in one line. Deciding what belongs in that line took considerably longer.
Craft·5 min read
How a Game Teaches You to Play It
If a game needs a page of instructions, the first level is wrong.
Craft·5 min read
How a Game Knows You Hit the Ground
Two rectangles overlapping is the easy part. Deciding what to do about it is where platformers go wrong.
Craft·5 min read
How a Game Plays a Tune With No Music File
Happy Birthday, in our 60th birthday game, is twenty-five pairs of numbers. Not one byte of it is audio.
Craft·5 min read
How a Photograph Becomes a Character You Can Move
The likeness is the easy half. Making it stand on a floor and turn around convincingly is the rest.
Craft·4 min read
How Long Should a Custom Game Take to Finish?
The commonest mistake in a commissioned game is making it too long. Nobody has ever complained that a gift was too easy to finish.
Guides·4 min read
How Long Does a Custom Game Take to Make?
The build is the predictable part. Everything before it is where a schedule is won or lost.
Craft·5 min read
How Many Frames a Walk Cycle Actually Needs
Two frames is enough. Understanding why is the difference between spending an art budget well and spending it on animation nobody sees.
Craft·5 min read
What One Person Watching Can Tell You
The hardest part of playtesting is keeping your mouth shut. Everything useful happens in the silence.
Guides·5 min read
How to Actually Give Someone a Game
The commission is the easy part. Handing over a link at a party without it feeling like an email is the bit people get wrong.
Craft·5 min read
How to Make a Character Walk Without It Looking Wrong
Feet that skate, legs that race, a stride that changes tempo halfway across a room. One arithmetic mistake causes all three.
Craft·5 min read
Putting an Entire Game in One File
One file you can email. No install, no server, no broken image paths in five years' time.
Guides·5 min read
Writing a Brief That Makes the Game Specific
Where should it be set is the question that decides everything. Most people answer it in four words.
Craft·6 min read
How We Built a Cassette Loading Screen
It counts to 48000 because that is what a 48K machine had. And while it performs, it is doing real work.
Craft·5 min read
Turning a Real Teddy Into a Playable Character
The hard part is not drawing the bear. It is deciding which of its repairs to keep.
Corporate·6 min read
12 Leaving Do Ideas for Someone Who Is Not Retiring
Somebody leaving for a better job is a happy occasion that everybody treats like a slightly sad one.
Family·6 min read
11 Leaving Gifts for a Teacher That Are Not Another Mug
A teacher leaving after twenty years has received roughly two hundred mugs. Aim slightly higher.
Birthdays·5 min read
Milestone Birthday Gifts for Men, by Decade
The decade matters more than the person's taste. Here is what shifts at each one.
Birthdays·5 min read
Milestone Birthday Gifts for Women, by Decade
Most milestone gift lists for women are the same list at every age. The decades are not the same.
Seasonal·6 min read
12 Mother's Day Gifts That Are Not Flowers Again
Flowers are not a bad gift. Flowers for the fourteenth consecutive year is not really a gift at all.
Family·5 min read
New Baby Gifts for the Parents, Not the Baby
Everyone buys for the baby. Almost nobody buys for the two people who have not slept.
Seasonal·7 min read
12 Ways to Do New Year at Home Without the Anticlimax
New Year's Eve is five hours of waiting for sixty seconds. Everything else is a plan to fill it.
Craft·5 min read
One Game, Playable by a Four-Year-Old and an Adult
A game for a four-year-old is not an easier game. It is a different set of five numbers, and one of them removes losing entirely.
Craft·5 min read
Parallax, and How a Painting Becomes a Place
Three ways to put a character into a painted scene. Only one of them is parallax, and choosing between them is a per-room decision.
Craft·4 min read
Pixel Art or Painted: Choosing a Style for a Commission
One of our games is 104KB of pixel art. Another is 20MB of painting. Neither choice was about taste.
Craft·5 min read
Proving a Game Is Finished, Rather Than Hoping
A build can compile, open, look perfect and be impossible to finish. Ours are tested by a machine that plays them.
Seasonal·6 min read
11 Secret Santa Gifts Without the Landfill
Secret Santa is a design problem with a tight budget and almost no information. It is solvable.
Corporate·6 min read
11 Remote Team Building Ideas Without the Forced Fun
The problem with remote team building is not that it is online. It is that it is compulsory.
Seasonal·6 min read
11 Valentine's Gifts When Your Partner Plays Games
The gift problem is not that they play games. It is that you are buying for a hobby you cannot assess.
Weddings·6 min read
11 Wedding Favours Guests Actually Take Home
Walk round any reception hall at midnight and count what is still on the tables. That is your data.
Craft·5 min read
What a Game Loop Actually Is
Every game ever made is the same three lines. Everything else is detail.
Craft·5 min read
Sprite Sheets, and Why Ours Does Not Use One
The standard answer is to pack every frame into one big image. Our games do the opposite, and the reason is worth understanding.
Craft·5 min read
The One Variable That Runs the Whole Game
Our platformer has eight states and one variable holding which one it is in. Every bug we did not have is because of that.
Guides·5 min read
What Can Go Wrong With a Commission
Commissions fail in a small number of predictable ways. All of them are avoidable and most are avoidable by you.
Craft·5 min read
What Makes Somebody Open a Game Twice
The measure of a commissioned game is not whether it is finished. It is whether it is opened again in March.
Craft·6 min read
What Makes a Jump Feel Right
Every good platformer cheats in your favour. Here are the four places ours does it, and what each one is worth.
Craft·5 min read
What Actually Makes a Web Game Load Slowly
The code in our largest game is a rounding error. Everything you wait for is a picture.
Guides·4 min read
What Photographs We Actually Need From You
Three photographs, and the good ones are almost never the ones people send first.
Guides·4 min read
Who Owns the Game When It Is Finished?
The build is yours to keep, share and replay. The reason that is true is the file format.
Craft·4 min read
Does a Game Need a Way to Lose?
Our gentlest difficulty has no way to lose at all. That is a design position, not a compromise.
Craft·5 min read
Why Games Run at Sixty Frames a Second
Sixty is not about smoothness. It is about the gap between pressing a button and seeing something happen.
Craft·4 min read
Why the Same Sound Twice Sounds Wrong
Collect one coin and it is satisfying. Collect fifty identical coins and you turn the sound off.
Craft·5 min read
Why Game Artwork Gets Drawn Twice
The first version of every level we build is coloured rectangles. That is not a shortcut, it is the only order that works.
Craft·5 min read
Why Our Games Do Not Use Delta Time
The standard advice is to scale everything by frame time. We do the opposite, on purpose, and the reason is testing.
Craft·6 min read
Why One of Our Games Is 104KB and Another Is 20MB
Three of our games sit at 104KB, 3.3MB and 20MB. The difference is not quality. It is a decision made early about where the art comes from.
Craft·10 min read
How We Built a Painted London Out of 502 Pictures
Twelve tube stations, three lines and a flight to Cape Town, in one HTML file. The problems that had to be solved, in the order they turned up.
Corporate·6 min read
4 Office Christmas Party Ideas That Aren't Cringe
The work Christmas party is the one event nobody chose to attend. Entertainment that survives a booked venue, a bar and a room of colleagues.
Birthdays·7 min read
60th Birthday Gifts for the Home Computer Generation
Tape loading, typed-in listings and Manic Miner. For the generation who did not just play the games, they made the machine work.
Birthdays·6 min read
70th Birthday Gifts for the First Gaming Generation
Pong in the pub, Space Invaders on holiday, Pac-Man at the seaside. For the generation who met video games out in the world rather than at home.
Family·6 min read
A Fighting Game Starring Your Entire Friend Group
Every friend group is secretly a fighting game roster. The moves, the taunts, the ancient rivalries. Here is how the group chat becomes a hand-painted fighter.
Birthdays·7 min read
5 Gifts for People Who Grew Up in Arcades
For the person who still remembers exactly where every 10p went. Gifts that respect the obsession instead of gesturing at it.
Weddings·6 min read
5 Stag and Hen Ideas That Aren't a Weekend in Prague
Not everyone wants a flight, a forfeit and a group chat meltdown. Ideas built around your actual friends rather than a package.
Seasonal·7 min read
One Christmas Gift for the Whole Family
Instead of adding to the pile, one gift the whole family actually shares. What works, what gathers dust, and why.
Birthdays·7 min read
5 Gifts for People Who Grew Up in the 90s
Cartridges, cover discs and taping the chart off the radio. Gifts for the 90s childhood that go further than a novelty tin.
Family·6 min read
Turning Your Child's Teddy Into a Video Game Hero
There is a particular face a child makes when their own teddy walks onto a screen. How a toybox becomes a hand-painted platformer.
Birthdays·6 min read
18th Birthday Gifts That Aren't Just Money in a Card
Eighteen is the hardest age to buy for, and cash has quietly become the default. What to give when you want the milestone to feel marked.
Anniversaries·6 min read
Silver and Ruby Anniversary Gifts That Aren't Jewellery
Twenty-five years in, the traditional list has run out of road. What to give a couple who have already been given everything, twice.
Birthdays·6 min read
50th Birthday Ideas With More Bite Than a Marquee
Fifty deserves better than a marquee, a buffet and a playlist from 1994. How to give the evening an actual centrepiece.
Weddings·6 min read
5 Proposal Ideas for People Who Hate Big Gestures
Flash mobs and stadium screens suit almost nobody. How to propose memorably without an audience.
Corporate·7 min read
5 Retirement Gift Ideas for a Colleague Leaving After Years
Someone is leaving after twenty years and the collection has raised £340. What to do with it that marks a career rather than a leaving date.
Corporate·7 min read
5 Corporate Event Entertainment Ideas That Aren't a Quiz
Ideas for company milestones, launches and team celebrations that work on a mixed and partly reluctant audience.
Birthdays·11 min read
30th Birthday Gift Ideas for Someone Who Grew Up on Games
They already own everything on Steam and finished it in a weekend. What to give someone whose whole childhood was a controller.
Birthdays·6 min read
40th Birthday Party Ideas Guests Actually Remember
Most fortieths are a room, a bar and a playlist. What to add when you want the party to have a centre rather than just a venue.
Weddings·6 min read
5 Wedding Gifts for the Couple Who Have Everything
They have lived together for six years and the gift list is all tumblers. What to give when the couple genuinely need nothing.
Weddings·6 min read
7 Wedding Entertainment Ideas That Aren't a Photo Booth
The photo booth has become the default, and it shows. Better ways to fill the gap between the wedding breakfast and the first dance.
Guides·7 min read
How Commissioning a Custom Game Actually Works
What happens between the first enquiry and the finished game, what we need from you, and the points where you get to change your mind.
Guides·7 min read
How Much Does a Custom Video Game Cost?
A straight answer on what a bespoke game costs, what actually moves the price, and how to tell which tier fits the occasion you are building for.