The Arcade: 20 Minigames and an Evicted Browser

There are arcade machines in our space stations. Sit down at one, and you can play 20 little minigames — dexterity, puzzles, high-score chasing. Why is something like that in a space survival game? And what does a complete web browser have to do with it? A little story about detours.

Why minigames at all? Because arcades belong to space stations like neon light — and because a kid who needs a break from surviving can stay in the game instead of reaching for the tablet. The machines even reward new personal bests with little goodies for the main game. Family-friendly sometimes means: a built-in break.

The detour. The first version of the arcade was a trick: the minigames were small web games, and the game bundled a complete embedded browser — a second Chromium, hidden inside — just to display them and the wiki. It worked. But it was heavy: bigger download, more memory usage, noticeable loading time at every machine.

The eviction. At some point the decision came: the browser goes. All 20 minigames were ported to a small, home-built 2D engine inside the game itself, the wiki right along with them. Weeks of work for something that looks exactly the same afterwards — the most thankless kind of task.

Until test night. Justus sat down at a machine and said: "Hey, these open instantly now!"

That's the sentence you do rebuilds like this for. No new feature, no new content — just a game that's suddenly lighter, faster, and more honest. Sometimes the best feature is the kilo you take off the game.