The Unfinish'd

The Unfinish’d is a shared, persistent low-poly open world, played in the browser and made by Arcade Union. I built its website, including a guide that covers every control, system and place in the world.

The game already had a large guide, written as one long wiki page. The website turned it into 37 pages, one for each topic, so each can be found, linked and shared on its own.

More depended on this domain than on any of the other games. The game server speaks WebSocket on the same address. Another system fetches a small file per player from it. Links from marketplace listings and land pages open the game at a particular place. A wiki and a set of plot pages were already linked from inside the game.

All of that had to keep working while the root of the domain stopped being the game and became a website, and while the guide, which the game’s own sessions keep editing, stayed the single source of truth.

• List what depends on the address first. The WebSocket route, the per-player mission files, the personal storage route, the poster uploads and the land pages were each recorded, kept as they were, and probed before and after the change.
• Redirect the deep links. /?plot= and /?visit= links now go to /play/ with their query intact, so listings and keeper links still land in the right place.
• Build the guide from the wiki. The website reads the game’s own wiki page, splits it by section and builds a page per topic. The wiki stays the one place to edit, and a rebuild republishes it.
• Keep the game out of the index. The website is the indexable front door. The game at /play/ is noindex, follow.

• Look: midnight navy and torch gold from the game’s menus and key art, with Cinzel for headings and a plain sans for reading.
• A guide that reads: tables, key caps and notes from the wiki are styled to be readable on a phone, with a topic list beside each page, previous and next links, and breadcrumbs.
• A layout shift caught and fixed: a measured run showed the heading font arriving late and moving the hero text. I worked out the fallback font’s metrics against Cinzel’s, so the swap no longer moves anything.
• No JavaScript on the website, and one stylesheet of 3.4 KB gzipped.
• Responsive art: the key art is cropped differently on a phone, so the title never sits on top of the painted logo.

• 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.
• One page per topic: 37 guide pages, each with its own description taken from its opening paragraph (or written where that was not a good summary), all in a 42-address sitemap.
• Redirects, not duplicates: the old single-page wiki address redirects to the guide, and the plot pages keep their addresses.
• 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 turns a long page into topic pages.
• Hosting: nginx on a dedicated server, the website in its own folder, the game mapped onto /play/, and the game’s WebSocket, storage, wiki and mission routes left in place.
• HTTP/2 deliberately off for this domain, because a WebSocket upgrade sent over HTTP/2 failed in testing and the game connection matters more than the website’s request count.