King Games came to us with an idea for a browser space shooter and very little else — no engine, no art, no prototype. The requirement that shaped everything was that it had to run in a browser with nothing to install. No download, no store, no plugin: open a link and play.
That rules out a great deal. It means the game runs on a canvas, in JavaScript, inside whatever browser and whatever hardware the player happens to have, and it means every asset has to justify its download. Work covered the engine itself, the sprite work, and the illustrated title screen.
Two pieces of that work are worth describing because they are the kind of thing players feel without being able to name.
The first is sprite variation. When the same enemy spawns repeatedly and every instance renders identically, a player stops reading them as separate things and starts reading the screen as a pattern — the game feels cheap long before anyone can say why. Repeated occurrences now draw from varied sprites, so a wave looks like a wave rather than one image stamped several times.
The second is that the game was decoupled from browser local storage. Leaning on local storage for game state seems free until it is not: it is cleared without warning, it is unavailable in private browsing, it is per-device rather than per-player, and it fails in ways that look like the game losing your progress rather than the browser discarding it. Removing that dependency meant reworking how state moves through the game, and it removed a whole category of complaint that would only ever have appeared in the wild.
The rest of the engagement was refinement, and it ran past the point most work stops — tuning behaviour, revisiting art, sanding down the parts that were technically finished but did not yet feel right.
Built with
I went to CODKRAFTERS with an idea for a space shooter and very little else. They handled all of it — the canvas engine, the sprite work, the illustrated title screen — and kept refining it long past the point most studios would have called it finished. It runs straight in a browser with nothing to install, which was the whole point. Delighted to have worked with them.
This was brand and creative work for King Games. See how we approach brand and creative work, or tell us what you want to build.