The Indie Pocket Hall

The glass

The glass got taller. For most of the previous decade a phone screen had been a small rectangle with the proportions of a television turned on its side. Around 2017 the big manufacturers stretched it: thinner borders, rounded corners, and a screen almost twice as tall as it was wide. Some phones gained a notch at the top for the camera. Designers learned a new word, the safe area, for the part of the screen that a corner, a notch or a gesture bar would not eat.

Tall screens suited portrait games held in one hand, and portrait became the default for anything casual. A game laid out for a tall screen puts the action in the middle, the score at the top, and nothing important at the very bottom, where the thumb rests and the system listens for swipes. That layout is so common now that it is easy to forget somebody had to work it out.

Flat, then soft

The flat colour of the one-tap years did not vanish, it softened. Palettes moved toward pastels and candy brights, gradients came back in gentle washes, and shapes grew rounder and chunkier. Low-polygon 3D became a look of its own: a toy town or a little island drawn with a few hundred flat-shaded triangles, viewed from above at an angle like a model on a table. It was cheap to render on a phone, it stayed readable at any size, and it looked made by hand.

On PCs and consoles, pixel art came back too, but as a choice rather than a limit. Independent artists drew with big visible pixels on screens that could have shown photographs, because the grid is a style with a long history and a small team can master it. The pixel went from a technical fact, explained in the halls before this one, to a decision.

Juice

The word of the period was juice. It meant all the small responses that make an action feel good: a shape that squashes when it lands and stretches when it jumps, a tiny pause on a hit, a puff of particles, a brief shake of the camera, a rising note for each point in a combo. None of it changes the rules. All of it changes how the rules feel. A much-shared conference talk from 2012 had shown one plain game becoming delightful through juice alone, and by the middle of the decade the idea had become ordinary craft. The principles came straight from traditional animation, where squash and stretch had been taught for generations.

Juice had a cost, and good designers counted it. A shake that delights in the first minute tires the eyes by the tenth. A flash that marks a hit can be a problem for players sensitive to flicker. The best games of the era used their effects sparingly, made the loudest ones optional, and kept the play readable underneath.

One engine, every screen

Behind the glass, the tools changed more than the hardware. Professional game engines that had once been expensive became free or cheap for small teams, and a single project could be exported to phones, PCs, consoles and the browser. In the browser itself, WebGL had already given web pages hardware-accelerated 3D, and in 2017 WebAssembly arrived in all the major browsers, so code compiled from other languages could run in a tab at close to native speed. The same year, the company behind the old browser plugin announced the date on which it would stop supporting it: the end of 2020.

The input

The thumb was still king, but its vocabulary grew. The most common control of the period was the drag anywhere: put your thumb down wherever you like and slide, and the game reads the slide as a direction. It is a joystick with no fixed position, and it solved the oldest problem of touch screens, which is that you cannot feel a button. Holding and releasing, swiping, and dragging to aim all became standard. Many games used only one of them, and said so on the first screen.

Phones also learned to tap back. Better vibration motors made it possible to give a short, crisp click for a button or a soft rumble for a landing, and a well-placed buzz made a touch screen feel less like glass. Like juice, haptics worked best when quiet.

A cursor and one button

In the browser, a new kind of multiplayer game appeared with almost no controls at all. You steered toward the mouse cursor, and one button, or one key, spent a little of your size for a burst of speed. That was enough to play against hundreds of strangers in the same arena, in real time, in a page that loaded in seconds. Because the controls were so simple, anyone could start, and because the other players were real, nobody ran out of surprises.

A console you can carry

In 2017 a hybrid console arrived that played on a television and then slid out of its dock to become a handheld, with two small controllers that clipped to its sides. It suited small games beautifully. A short roguelite run or a tidy puzzle could be played on the sofa and then finished on a train, and independent games found a large new audience on it. On PCs, gamepads had settled into a common layout, and browsers could read them too.

The room

The room was the phone in your pocket, the browser tab beside your work, and, increasingly, a video of someone else playing. Watching games became as normal as playing them. Live streams and recorded videos made some small games famous overnight, and designers began to think about how a game looked to an audience as well as how it felt in the hand.

Free to start

On phones, free-to-play became the dominant business. Most of the top-earning phone games cost nothing to download and made their money from purchases inside the game or from advertising. A common pattern was the rewarded ad: watch a short advertisement and get a second chance or a bonus. Industry reports in these years repeatedly described the same shape: a small share of players paid for most of the revenue, while most people paid nothing at all.

One part of that business drew sustained criticism. Many games sold randomised packs or boxes of items, where the buyer did not know what they would get. In 2017 the reward system of a big-budget game became the subject of a widely reported row about paying for random progression, and the following year regulators in Belgium and the Netherlands concluded that some paid boxes of this kind broke their gambling laws. Other countries began requiring games to publish the odds. We mention it because it is part of the history. Eracade has nothing like it: coins here are free, and nothing is sold at random.

Hyper-casual

Around 2017 the industry coined a name for the simplest games on the store: hyper-casual. They had one mechanic, one finger, a clean style and no tutorial, and they earned their money from advertising. Publishers built a production line around them. A small studio would make a rough prototype in days, the publisher would show it to a few thousand people through cheap advertisements, and if enough of them installed it, the game was polished and launched. Ideas were tested like headlines. Stack the slab, drop through the tower, throw the pin, swallow the town: each one could be explained in a single moving picture.

The production line had real costs: many studios chasing the same few ideas, games built around the next advertisement, and copies of copies. It also produced some lovely toys and taught a generation of designers to say what their game was in three seconds. Both things are true.

Cells in a browser tab

In 2015 a browser game in which you played a cell, eating smaller cells and fleeing bigger ones, became a sensation among school pupils and streamers. Its web address ended in .io, a country-code domain popular with technology companies, and the suffix gave a whole genre its name. A snake game in the same style followed the next year, and dozens more came after: games where you painted territory, flew planes, or pushed rivals off a platform, all against real people, all in a tab, all free. The io game was the browser’s answer to the phone store: no install, no account, a link and a name.

One hundred players and a shrinking circle

The battle royale took its name from a Japanese novel and film of the turn of the century. The game form began in mods for military simulations: drop a crowd of players onto a large map with nothing, and shrink the safe area until only one remains. In 2017 a standalone game built on that idea sold in enormous numbers on PC, and later the same year a free, cartoon-styled version with building became one of the most played games in the world. The shrinking circle was a brilliant piece of design. It guaranteed that every match would end, pushed players toward one another, and turned a huge map into a tense small room by the final minutes.

Runs, deaths and unlocks

Independent studios on PC built one of the defining genres of the decade on an old idea. A 1980 dungeon game for university computers, called Rogue, generated a new dungeon every time and deleted your character when it died. Games that borrowed its shape were called roguelikes. The newer games, often called roguelites, kept the fresh layout and the permanent death of each run but let something carry over: a new weapon unlocked, a shortcut opened, a character met. A run lasted half an hour, every run was different, and losing was part of the story. Card games joined in, with decks you built during the run, and so did shooters, platformers and dungeon crawls.

At the start of 2019 a fan-made mod for a strategy game invented the auto-battler. Players bought units from a shop, arranged them on a board and then watched them fight on their own, round after round. Within months several large studios had released games of their own in the same form. It is a striking example of the decade’s pattern: an idea born in the community, spread by streaming, and turned into a genre within a single year.

Three design ideas we borrowed

1. Reward the perfect, forgive the near miss

   In Slab Stack, slabs slide in from alternate sides and a tap drops them. Whatever hangs over the edge is sliced off, so a sloppy drop costs you width rather than the run. Land one dead-on and nothing is lost. The design idea of the period is right there: a single tap, a visible margin for error that shrinks as you go, and a small, loud celebration for doing it perfectly.

   Slab Stack, 2016 Play Slab Stack

2. Put everyone in one room

   Coil Arena sets a glowing coil loose in a round arena with ten rivals. You eat sparks to grow, burn length to boost, and pop rivals by making them run into you. The io games showed that a crowd makes its own stories, and that a closing boundary keeps a crowd honest, so here a tide ring pulls in every thirty seconds. Our rivals are steered by the game rather than by strangers, so the arena stays friendly.

   Coil Arena, 2016 Play Coil Arena

3. Plan, then let go

   Auto Brigade asks you to spend cogs on clockwork critters, arrange them on a small board and merge three alike into a stronger one. Then you stop touching anything and watch them fight. The auto-battler moved the skill from fast hands to good plans, and the moment of letting go is the whole drama. Our cogs are earned in the game and can never be bought.

   Auto Brigade, 2019 Play Auto Brigade

What ended the era

Nothing ended this era cleanly. The phone kept growing, the free-to-play business kept its shape, and many of the games of these years are still played. But two changes at the start of the next decade shifted the ground. In 2020 much of the world spent months at home, and games became one of the main ways people stayed in touch. And in 2021 the most widely used premium phone platform began asking users whether apps could track them across other apps, which made the targeted advertising behind many hyper-casual games less precise and more expensive.

Meanwhile the old browser plugin reached the end of its support on the last day of 2020, and the browser, which had spent the decade quietly gaining speed, graphics and sound, was ready to be a games machine on its own terms. The next hall is about what happened when a game could be one shared puzzle a day, a link in a group chat, and a small square grid of coloured results.

What we take from the Indie Pocket years is the craft: a control explained on the first screen, an action that feels good before it means anything, a run that ends fairly and begins again at once, and the courage to make a game about one idea. What we leave behind is the business that sometimes grew around that craft. The games on this floor are free, the coins are free, and the only thing a cabinet here asks of you is attention.

Further reading

Outside links are chosen for being stable, general and free to read. We link; we do not copy.

• Free-to-play (Wikipedia) How the free-to-start business model works and where it came from.
• Hyper-casual game (Wikipedia) One-mechanic phone games and the advertising model behind them.
• Battle royale game (Wikipedia) The genre's roots in mods and its rise in 2017.
• Roguelike (Wikipedia) From a 1980 dungeon game to the roguelites of the 2010s.
• WebAssembly (Wikipedia) The 2017 standard that let compiled engines run in a browser tab.