The games studio gets its own door

The consultancy site was doing double duty. Contract work up front. Games leaking in through the portfolio like they’d wandered into the wrong meeting.

That worked until it didn’t. Someone looking for a party game shouldn’t have to parse a services page first. Someone hiring for a product build shouldn’t land on a known-issues table about CPU bots.

So we cut a second door.

Same repo, second host

apps/games is an Astro mini-site inside the Threesided monorepo. Root still builds threesided.com. Games builds to its own Netlify project on games.threesided.com.

Shared art where it helps. Separate CSS and copy where the tone diverges. The games site is allowed to be louder. Patch notes, severity tags, jokes that still convert. The consultancy site stays the grown-up sibling.

Roster, not redesign

We shipped the GameCard shelf as the homepage. There’s an arcade-cabinet wall prototype under /prototypes/cabinet. It stays there. Noindex. Fun experiment. Not the front door yet.

Promoting a layout before the roster content settled felt like rearranging furniture while boxes were still in the hallway. The shelf is honest. Click a box. Ignore the CTA. Both are valid.

What “shipped” means here

A visitor can land, skim the roster, open a sheet, bounce to the changelog, or leave knowing the studio has a point of view. That’s the job.

I keep catching myself opening the consultancy site when I mean the games one. Old muscle memory. Two doors take a week to feel normal.