Hold The World Together

Hold The World Together is a tower defence game set in The Unfinish’d, played in the browser and made by Arcade Union. I built its website: a short front page, a how-to-play page, a press kit and a guide that documents every structure, enemy, event and page in the game.

The game had a wiki, but it lived beside the game with no front door, and the domain’s root was the game’s loading screen. It also had three things that could not be allowed to break: a leaderboard endpoint behind a secret the browser must never see, a handshake that the Arcade Union hub uses to tell the game who the player is, and a build that shares its folder with an older address.

• Website first, game on /play/. The same arrangement as the other game sites, with the game marked noindex, follow.
• Keep the leaderboard route exactly as it is. The game posts scores to its own address, and the server adds the credential. That route stays at the root and is byte-for-byte unchanged.
• Protect the hub handshake. Links that carry the player’s details are forwarded to the game, whether they arrive in the query or in the part of the address that servers never see.
• Build the guide from the data. The wiki is generated from the game’s own resource files, so the website reads that output and republishes it. When a number changes in the game, the guide changes with it.

• Look: ink-violet, parchment and thread-gold taken from the game’s palette, with the game’s own logo in the header.
• Screenshots from the game’s own tools: the boss page, a wave under attack, a different board and the campaign map were rendered by the game’s own capture scripts, so they are real frames. The hero is a crop of one with the interface left out.
• A guide that fits phones: wide tables scroll sideways inside their own container, and each structure and enemy keeps its small sprite beside its figures.
• No JavaScript except a 150-byte hand-off script that forwards hub links, and one stylesheet of 3.6 KB gzipped.
• Layout shift fixed: the heading font’s fallback metrics are matched to it, so the hero text does not move when it loads.

• 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.
• A page per topic: 11 guide pages, each with its own description, in a 16-address sitemap.
• A stale claim caught: the game’s wiki generator still said “ten pages, 30 stars” while the game has twelve pages and 36 stars. The guide build corrects those lines, and the source has been flagged to be fixed.
• Launched deliberately: reviewed in a noindex staging mode, then switched to indexable on 13 October 2026.

• Generator: Eleventy, sharp and lightningcss, from the shared game-website template, with a guide importer that reads the generated wiki and its sprites.
• Hosting: nginx on a dedicated server, with the website in its own folder and the game mapped onto /play/. The live configuration here is a real file rather than a link, because it holds a secret, so it was edited on the server and the secret never left it.
• Deployment: one command builds, validates and uploads the site, then requests every sitemap address.