How this site
is made.
A colophon is the small note at the back of a book that describes how the book was set: typeface, paper, binding, the people who made it. This is the digital equivalent. The craft notes behind Arcynia.
Typography
Palette
Pulled from synthwave album covers, 80s arcade marquees and the particular kind of CRT glow you only see in the dark.
Stack
Boring on purpose. Every choice optimises for "loads in a tab, works in five years, easy to maintain solo."
- PHP. Server-side rendering, no SPA.
- MariaDB. Relational store for games, transmissions, lab experiments and admin data.
- Apache + .htaccess. URL routing without a framework.
- Bootstrap 5. Utility grid plus a minimal component layer; everything else is bespoke CSS.
- Three.js. WebGL renderer for The Lab (Black Hole and more to come).
- Vanilla JavaScript. No React, no Vue, no bundler, no transpiler.
- GD. Server-side image processing for thumbnails, OG images and Grid variants.
What's not on the stack
The list of tools we deliberately skipped is almost as interesting as the list we kept.
- No JS framework (React, Vue, Svelte, etc.).
- No build step. The CSS and JS you see are the CSS and JS that ships.
- No TypeScript.
- No CSS-in-JS. No CSS modules. Just stylesheets.
- No CDN bundler. External libraries (Bootstrap, Three.js) load from public CDNs and that's it.
- No tracking pixels. Standard analytics only, behind a config flag.
- No A/B testing harness. We pick a thing and ship it.
Inspiration
- Synthwave. The music, the album covers, the particular shade of magenta that only exists in 1985.
- 80s arcade halls. Coin slots, attract loops, the unforgiving difficulty curve.
- The demoscene. Beauty in 64 kilobytes, vertex shaders as art form.
- Cyberpunk fiction. Neon, rain, glitch, signal noise, terminals you can lean into.
- Apple's original Human Interface Guidelines. The principle of no surprises, no thinking still feels right thirty-some years later.
A love letter to the arcade
The arcade was the first place many of us understood what a game could be.
A coin in your hand.
Twenty seconds to commit.
Three lives.
No tutorials.
No skip buttons.
No "are you sure?"
The moment the screen lit up, you were in.
You played. You reacted. You learned.
Modern games often ask for more than the moment itself.
Hours. Subscriptions. Daily logins. Push notifications. Systems built to pull you back tomorrow.
Arcynia is built for something smaller.
The coin.
The twenty seconds.
The clean run.
The quick restart.
The tab you can close without consequence.
Arcynia is built with love and respect for the arcade.
The unfair difficulty.
The brutal honesty.
The clarity of mission.
The simple fact that nobody ever needed your email address to let you play.
If we get even half of that right, it is enough.
Made by
Designed and built at Injosoft in Sweden. Every layout, palette choice and turn of phrase on this site is a deliberate decision, reviewed by hand. The taste, the rhythm and the neon are ours. The tools we use to ship them keep getting better.