Built for a phone on a train
Tapping a button on a bad signal and nothing happening, so you tap it six more times. What we did about that, and about batteries, small speakers and closing the app mid-game.
Glødkeeper is a web app. It runs in the browser on any phone, tablet or computer, and you can add it to your home screen so it opens like an app. Most people will play it on a phone, and phones live on trains, in car parks and at the far end of the garden. This autumn was mostly about making the game behave there.
When the signal goes
It started with a bug report from our own phone: tap, nothing happens, tap again, and again. Each of those taps was a request waiting on a weak signal, and when they all landed at once the game tried to do the same thing seven times.
Now every page times its own requests. When the connection is slow, a small amber signal icon pulses in the middle of the screen and repeat taps are held back while the first one is still on its way. When it is unusable, the game says so plainly instead of pretending to work.
Closing the app mid-game
People close apps. Phones close them for you. A game you were halfway through now picks up where you left off when you come back, and time you spent away doesn’t count against you: a timed level doesn’t keep ticking while your phone was in your pocket.
If you open the same game in two places, a phone and a laptop say, only one of them plays. The other offers to take over, so two screens can never fight over one board.
When you’re gone mid-match
In Glødstone, if your signal drops during your turn, the game plays the turn for you so the match carries on. That is being extended to every head-to-head game this winter. For solo games that don’t need an opponent, the plan is simpler: keep playing without a signal and settle up when you are back, starting with Smashlings.
Batteries and small speakers
A game that drains your battery doesn’t get played twice. We went through every page looking for animations that kept running when nothing on screen was moving, and stopped them. The screen no longer stays awake unless you ask it to.
Phone speakers can’t play low notes, so sounds designed on headphones came out thin or not at all. Low sounds are now reshaped so a small speaker can actually play them.
A quiet hour on Sundays
From 03:00 UK time every Sunday the game closes for at least half an hour while we tidy up, deploy and test. The game tells you a day ahead, stops new matches starting just before, and shows a “back soon” screen during. Better one predictable quiet hour than surprises at random.
Why a web app
One version for everyone, updated the moment we fix something, with nothing to download and no store between us and the people playing. If a store version would ever give players something the web can’t, it is on the roadmap as a maybe.