The splash screen that could never work
Our launch screen looked wrong and we knew why: a small square of artwork stranded in a field of flat colour. The obvious fix was to make it prettier. Add the title. Add a menu. Maybe a sign-in button.
None of that was possible. The engine draws a launch splash before any of the game exists — no code is running, so nothing can move, and nothing can be tapped.
It is a single image and a background colour, and that is the whole feature. Every idea we had for it — floating text, a menu, accounts — required something the splash fundamentally cannot do.
So the splash stops trying. It fills the screen with one colour and hands straight over to a real screen, which does all the things:
The lighthouse, the title drifting gently, the promise the whole game is built on, and a menu. The Sign in button is deliberately there and deliberately disabled — accounts arrive with the co-op work, and we would rather show the shape now than surprise you with a new button later.
It moves like the game
The title bobs. The line beneath it breathes. Gulls drift across. All of it is the same idle motion the town itself uses — pennants, chimney smoke, birds over the water — so the first thing you see already feels like the game instead of a poster of it.
It is also deliberately cheap: it draws its own sky and its own gulls without loading the town at all, so the first frame does not wait on a whole village.