About Robot Arcade

What this site is

Twelve browser games built around robots and machines, and a library of written guides explaining the mechanics underneath them. The games are free, need no account, and run directly in the browser using HTML5 Canvas.

The site exists because most places to play free browser games are aggregators. They embed games from elsewhere, know very little about them, and describe them in text that could apply to almost anything. If a site cannot tell you why a game is interesting, it probably does not know.

Robot Arcade takes the other approach. Fewer games, all of them built here, each with a page that explains what it is actually asking you to do and how to get better at it. That is only possible because the person writing the page also wrote the game.

Why robots

Machines are a genuinely good fit for arcade game design, for a reason that is not obvious. Arcade games need enemies whose behaviour is legible - you have to be able to look at something and know what it is about to do - and machines are believable when they behave that way. A robot that telegraphs its attack identically every single time is not a design compromise, it is just a robot.

It also means every opponent on the site can break into geometric shards rather than anything graphic. There is no blood, gore or violence against people anywhere here, and that is a consequence of the theme rather than something bolted on afterwards.

How games are selected

Every game on the site was written for it. Nothing is an iframe pointing at someone else's server, which means nothing can change, break or start showing its own advertising without us knowing.

A game goes live once it can be finished or survived on a real phone and a real keyboard, not once it runs. That is also when its controls, difficulty rating and recommended device get written, which is why they match what actually happens when you play it. Where a game is genuinely better with a mouse, its page says so.

The bar for adding a game is that it introduces a decision the library does not already contain. Twelve games that each ask something different is more useful than forty that are the same game with different art.

How the guides are researched

The guides describe mechanics, and the numbers in them - window lengths, recovery times, damage values - are read out of the games' own source rather than estimated from playing. When a guide says a deflect window is 0.18 seconds, that is the figure the code uses.

Where something is a judgement rather than a measurement, the guides say so. 'This is the fastest way to improve' is an opinion formed from a lot of playing. 'The recovery on a heavy attack is 0.34 seconds' is not an opinion. Keeping those two things apart is what the fact-checking policy is about.

What this site does not do

There are no accounts, no logins and no server-side storage of anything. Your scores, favourites and recently played list live in your own browser and are never uploaded.

There are consequently no global leaderboards. The site cannot measure how many people play a game or how they rank against each other, so it does not display invented figures. The 'popular games' page shows editorial picks and your own most-played list, and says which is which.

There are no user reviews, star ratings, player counts or awards anywhere on the site, because there is no mechanism that could produce honest ones.

Advertising

The site is built with space reserved for advertising, placed away from game controls so an advert can never be mistaken for something you meant to press. Where advertising is running, it is labelled.

If and when an advertising network is connected, the privacy policy and cookie policy will describe what it sets and why. Until then those pages describe it conditionally rather than pretending it is already there.

Frequently asked questions