Two New Arcade Games: Cookie Crumble and Stellar Bastion
The arcade just hit 42 games. This past week I shipped Cookie Crumble (a match-3 puzzle game), Stellar Bastion (space station defense), and a cloud save system that ties everything together.
Cookie Crumble: A Match-3 with a Story to Tell
Cookie Crumble started as a question: what does it take to build a real Candy Crush-style match-3 in the browser? Not a toy demo — a real one, with star ratings, goal-based levels, a retry loop, and enough personality to keep you playing.
Turns out, the answer is about 40 commits over five days.
The game follows Teresa, a baker working her way up from a humble kitchen. Her story unfolds between levels through illustrated overlays — you’re not just clearing boards, you’re helping her upgrade her bakery. Tier 1 alone has seven kitchen upgrades, each with custom pixel art generated in PixelLab. There’s a pixel art map screen that shows your progress, and the whole thing has a warmth to it that I didn’t expect when I started.
The core mechanics follow the mobile match-3 playbook pretty closely: swap adjacent tiles, match three or more, clear goals before you run out of moves. Each level has a target score and specific items to clear, and your performance earns one to three stars. If you fail, you get a “keep playing” prompt — no hard stop, just a nudge to retry. That “one more try” loop is the whole genre. Get it right and nothing else matters as much.
Voice, Celebration, and Polish
I wanted to nail the feel of completing a level. Mobile match-3 games have that moment — the combo breakdown, the star reveal, the reward cascade. I built the whole sequence: combo tally, stars animating in one at a time, tap to continue. Sounds simple. The timing has to be precise or it feels flat.
Teresa also has a voice. Recorded callouts for level starts, big combos, and completions, with speech synthesis as a fallback. Tuning the pitch took more passes than I expected. Too robotic and it’s weird. Too exaggerated and it’s annoying. There’s a narrow band where it sounds like a person, and that’s where I landed.
The whole visual side went through an overhaul. Board surface rebuilt for clarity — you need to read the grid at a glance. Goal bar redesigned at the top showing exactly what you need. Added a How to Play modal, responsive layout, and a gameplay video on the title screen. The promo art features Teresa and a cow mascot, which turned out to give the game a lot of personality in the arcade grid.
Last couple of days were pure polish. Timer vs. animation race conditions — the clock expiring mid-cascade and killing your score — took several passes. Score card positioning. Pause system leaving orphaned tweens. Reward cascades flowing into the next level. Nobody notices this stuff when it works. Everyone notices when it doesn’t.
Stellar Bastion: Quick Build, Complete Game
Stellar Bastion came together in a single day on April 12. It’s a space station defense game — waves of enemies approach your station, and you defend it with turrets and shields. The hook is the wave transition system: between waves, you get a brief window to reposition and upgrade. There’s a no-damage bonus for surviving a wave without taking a hit, which adds a risk-reward layer that keeps things tense.
I did come back on April 14 to fix some wave transition bugs — edge cases where the next wave would trigger before the previous one fully resolved, causing overlapping enemy spawns. Those bugs only show up when someone pushes through fifteen waves. Ship it, find it, fix it.
Cloud Saves Are Here
This one I’m excited about. Game progress in the arcade now saves to your account. Log in on your laptop, play Cookie Crumble through level 12, then open the arcade on your phone — your progress is there. Same stars, same unlocks, same spot on the map.
It hooks into the arcade shell, so individual games don’t need their own save systems. Each game writes to a standard format, the shell handles sync. Load on launch, save on meaningful state changes. Your progress follows you.
Most browser games treat you as disposable. Clear your cache, lose everything. Not anymore.
42 Games and Counting
Cookie Crumble is game #41 and Stellar Bastion is #42 in the arcade. Every one of them is free to play, runs in the browser, and now saves your progress to the cloud if you’re logged in. Puzzles, strategy, action, defense, cards, idle — the collection keeps growing.
If you want to try either game, head over to arcade.echoforge.games and look for Cookie Crumble or Stellar Bastion in the grid. And if you have thoughts, the Discord is always open.
— Bruno