We Built an Arcade for Our Own Game Engine

At Evolved Tech, co-founder Kehinde Owolabi created epic.js, a lightweight 2D game engine for browsers. Desire, the author, built the editor for game creation and the arcade platform for showcasing games. The arcade struggled initially due to the lack of a way to display games without screenshots. Desire decided to create thumbnails from game data, which worked but yielded abstract visuals.

Next, he developed a leaderboard system, ranking games by weekly likes, but this quickly became problematic. Users were tempted to artificially boost their rankings by refreshing the page. To address this, Desire implemented a weekly reset for likes and introduced a leaderboard card in the user inbox. However, without user engagement, the leaderboard remained empty.

Comments were added easily, but replies posed a challenge. Desire initially used a browser prompt, which proved awkward on mobile devices. After several iterations, he replaced it with an inline reply form under each comment, enabling nested replies up to two levels deep.

Perhaps the most memorable issue arose when Desire implemented usernames for game creators. Initially, each game displayed the creator's email prefix, which was unappealing and prone to breaking over time. To solve this, Desire introduced usernames that were 3-20 characters long, lowercase, unique, and permanent. This design choice was only realized retrospectively, as it prevented broken links from old shares and followers.

The author's own comment thread serves as a testament to the struggles and triumphs of building the arcade.