The Last Lighthouse

The Last Lighthouse is a free point-and-click adventure in hand-crafted pixel art, played in the browser. It is made by Arcade Union, and I built its website: a short, fast set of pages that explain the game, show it, and send people into it.

Before the website, the game was served from the root of its domain, and the page people landed on was the game’s loading screen. That is fine for a player who already knows what it is, and useless for anyone else, including search engines.

A game that runs in a canvas has almost no text for a visitor, a link preview or a search engine to read. The loading page said nothing about the game, and the first download is large, roughly 80 MB, which is a surprise if nobody tells you.

It needed a front door that described the game honestly, kept the pixel art crisp at every size, and gave press and players something to link to, without touching the game or its deploy process.

• The website is the root, the game is /play/. The domain’s home page is the website, and the game moves to /play/, which is marked noindex, follow so the website is the indexable front door.
• A small, complete page set. Home, How to play, About and a Press kit, each with its own title, description and canonical address.
• Say what it is and how far along it is. The status is stated on the home page (“Prototype · work in progress”), and the large first download is stated in the page, not discovered mid-load.
• Never touch the game. The website lives in its own folder on the server. The game’s own deploy replaces its whole folder every time, so nothing of the website can live there.

• Look: the palette comes from the game’s own interface, a deep navy panel and lantern gold, and the headings use the game’s own pixel typeface, subset to the characters needed.
• Pixel art stays square: screenshots are resized in whole-number steps with nearest-neighbour scaling, then served as AVIF and WebP at three widths, so every pixel is still a pixel on a phone.
• No JavaScript. The whole site is static HTML and one stylesheet of 2.8 KB gzipped.
• A press kit: key facts, a logo and four screenshots to download, and the font’s licence linked from the credits.
• Share image: a 1200 by 630 image built from the key art and logo, so a link looks like the game when it is pasted anywhere.

• Fundamentals on every page: a unique title and description, a canonical address, one h1, and the language declared.
• Structured data: a VideoGame entry tied to its publisher, WebSite, WebPage and breadcrumbs, with no ratings or reviews, because there are none.
• Crawl control: a sitemap and a robots.txt that keeps the game’s large binaries out of the crawl.
• Staged launch: the site went live in a noindex building mode first, was reviewed, and was switched to indexable on 13 October 2026, and added to Search Console afterwards.

• Generator: Eleventy, with images processed by sharp and CSS minified by lightningcss.
• Shared template: the same page template, data file and theme variables now also build the websites for FarmFolk, The Unfinish’d and Hold The World Together.
• Hosting: nginx on a dedicated server, the website in its own folder, the game mapped onto /play/.
• Deployment: one command builds, validates and uploads the site, then requests every page in the sitemap and fails if any does not return a 200.