FarmFolk

FarmFolk is a free isometric farming and town-building game that runs in the browser, made by Arcade Union. I built its website, and moved the game onto /play/ so the root of the domain could become a proper front page.

The game already had accounts and saved farms on a server of its own. The brief for the website was to add the front door without disturbing any of that.

The game was served straight from the domain’s root, with a share image and a sitemap that had to travel with every deploy, and a header telling search engines to stay away because it was a prototype.

Two things made it more delicate than a plain launch page. The game talks to its own API on the same address, so moving it had to leave that route alone, and its engine files are large, so the way they were served mattered.

• Move the game, not the API. The game goes to /play/. The API stays at /api/ on the same address, so the game needs no changes and there is no cross-origin request to get wrong.
• Make the first page do the explaining. Plant, mill, bake, sell and expand: the loop is the first thing the page says, with a screenshot of a real farm beside it.
• Be clear about money. The currency is an ordinary in-game currency, not a token, and no wallet is needed. The page says so in a sentence people can read.
• Look like the game. A light, warm design, rather than the dark template used for the other games, taken from the game’s own parchment and wood interface.

• Look: cream, leaf green and wood brown from the game’s own panels, with a rounded display typeface, and green chosen dark enough to pass contrast checks on every background.
• Imagery: the hero is a crop of a real screenshot with the game’s interface left out, so it reads as a place rather than a window.
• Fast engine delivery: the 34 MB engine file is served brotli-compressed at about 5.9 MB, and the hashed files are cached for a year, while the unhashed ones are always revalidated.
• No JavaScript on the website, and one stylesheet of 3 KB gzipped.
• Share image: the game’s existing share image is reused, and the old address for it still works.

• Fundamentals on every page: a unique title and description, a canonical address, one h1 and the language declared.
• Structured data: VideoGame, WebSite, WebPage and breadcrumbs, with the publisher linked.
• Crawl control: a sitemap, and a robots.txt that keeps the game’s engine files and its API out of the crawl.
• Indexing changed deliberately: the prototype’s blanket noindex header was removed for the website only, and kept on /play/. The site launched on 13 October 2026.

• Generator: Eleventy, sharp and lightningcss, from the shared game-website template.
• Hosting: nginx on a dedicated server, the website in its own folder, the game mapped onto /play/, and the API proxied as before.
• Deployment: the website is deployed separately from the game, and the game’s own deploy script was pointed at /play/ so its post-deploy checks still pass.