Video games

In our games, the world does not stop when the app closes. Elapsed time is replayed on the device by a deterministic simulation engine: the same rules, the same seed and the same duration always produce exactly the same outcome. The game therefore knows what happened while the player was away without asking a server, and without a network.

The engine is written separately from the presentation, in TypeScript with no dependencies. It runs from the command line, has its own tests, and balancing is tuned on hundreds of simulated evenings before a single screen is drawn. A rule is fixed in one line, measured, then played.

• Simulation replayed on the device from the elapsed time
• Reproducible outcome: same seed, same absence, same story
• Engine independent of the display, tested on its own
• Balancing measured on simulated games, not guessed

A game notification is often bait: it promises an event that does not exist to bring the player back. Ours are local, scheduled on the device from the simulation itself. When the game says something happened, it is because the simulation produced it.

The same discipline applies to the rest of the design. The player should never feel manipulated: no interstitial ads cutting into the game, a premium currency that never buys a win, and progression that rewards playing rather than paying.

• Local notifications, computed from the simulation
• No interstitial ads
• Premium currency with no win for sale
• Progression that rewards play, not spending

Our games run first in the browser, on phone and computer alike. Rendering is light, with no UI framework. The game installs on the home screen like an app and updates itself, file by file, without going through an app store review.

This lets us ship a fix the same day and share a link to play instead of asking for a download. The iPhone and Android apps then carry the same game, with the same rules engine.

• Playable in the browser, installable on the home screen
• Updates published directly, with no review delay
• One game codebase for the web and the upcoming apps
• Eight languages, including Arabic

Every version of the game is played end to end by a bot, by touch, in a headless browser at phone size: first launch, cleaning in every mini-game family, looking after the cat, purchases, coming back the next day. Each step is captured and checked: what you tap is not hidden, nothing overflows, no image is broken, no error shows up.

Texts go through the same checks: every line has a maximum length, and every language is checked for phrases left untranslated. A comedy game lives by its timing, and timing breaks on a line that runs too long or a sentence left in French in the German version.