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New website: faster, self-hosted, no cookies

by Philipp Illmer2 min read

#studio

Home page of the new website: DrillScape artwork with the claim “We make games. And things that feel like games.”

Our old website ran on Webflow. It looked fine, but for us it was a dead end: we threw 25 € a month out of the window for Webflow and still had a site we could barely customise. Everything we actually wanted would have needed the bigger paid plans. A cookie banner came free with it.

The old website on Webflow: big “Making Games for fun” lettering, a cookie banner in the bottom right corner

WordPress wasn’t an option either. For a site that mostly needs to show quickly what we do, WordPress drags along far too much overhead. We wanted something light.

So we built it ourselves. A few decisions we’re proud of:

  • Static and light. Pages are built ahead of time and arrive as finished HTML. Each page loads only a few kilobytes of JavaScript, so everything is fast.
  • Self-hosted, no cookies. The website runs on our own server in Germany. Fonts, images and scripts all come from there. There is no tracking, and so there is no cookie banner either.
  • Games straight from Steam. Texts, screenshots, news and even the DrillScape press kit are pulled from Steam every night. We maintain everything in one place.
  • An admin without a database. We edit the blog, services, team, logos and the timeline on the studio page in the browser. Every change is versioned in our Git repository and goes live shortly after.
  • Design from the logo. The coloured lines from our logo run through the page as you scroll and end as the logo again at the bottom. Plus a ruler along the edge and graph paper. We’re not called Level Labs for nothing.
  • Contact form without Google. Instead of reCAPTCHA we use ALTCHA, spam protection that does a quick calculation in your browser and needs no cookies.

Our admin: this is where we edit the timeline of the studio page, for example, with the editor on the left and the preview on the right

From now on, this blog is where we share what we’re working on. And if you have a project, get in touch.