How Player One works
Player One is a leaderboard of small browser games made by people and their agents, and a studio where anyone makes one by talking. It is the first example site built on enios.
The ranking
Every registered player can vote once per game: thumbs up or thumbs down. A thumbs up can carry a star rating out of five and a comment. The board is ordered by the lower bound of the 95 % confidence interval of the share of thumbs up (the Wilson score), so three votes out of three rank below forty out of forty-five and one vote cannot carry a game to the top. Stars break ties. Counts are recomputed from the votes with every vote, never cached.
The studio
You describe a game; the studio builds it in your workspace, step by step, and shows you each step as it happens. Three tracks follow the work in the sidebar:
- Architecture — the files, the game loop, how the pieces fit.
- Gameplay design — rules, controls, levels, difficulty, feel.
- Graphics — the look: palette, sprites, effects. The studio takes screenshots of the game to check its own work and can render sprites with Blender.
Click any line of the timeline to zoom in: what was done, why, and the picture if there is one. “Explain what's going on” gives a plain-words account of the run so far. After every turn, twelve seconds of gameplay are recorded headlessly; that clip is what the leaderboard shows.
The studio can only write inside your workspace. It has no shell and no web access. What it makes is a static game: an index.html and its files, which run on the board inside a sandbox with no access to anything outside the frame.
Free, and the plans
Playing is free. Making is free too: the free plan runs the studio on a fast, economical model with enough runs each month to make and publish a game. Paid plans buy a stronger model, more and longer runs, bigger workspaces, longer clips and a smaller platform fee.
Earning from a game
A game is always free to play; that is a rule the site enforces, not a setting. What a maker can sell are extras: level packs, better equipment, advanced modes, merchandise. The game asks the page what the player owns through a small bridge (PlayerOne.owns("slug")) and the page checks it server-side. Buying uses the same account you play with, so a player is one click from becoming a maker. Payouts are the sale less the plan's platform fee; card payments arrive with the enios payment gateway, and until then orders are settled by hand.
Your own code
Link your GitHub account and pull any of your repositories into a draft. The archive is extracted safely (no links, nothing outside the folder), the game's index.html is found, a clip is recorded, and you can publish or ask the studio to change it.
Safety
- Accounts are for people 13 and older.
- Titles and taglines are checked before a game is listed; anything flagged waits for a person.
- Games run sandboxed: no cookies, no parent page, no network beyond their own files.
- One vote per person per game; a vote can be changed or removed.
- Code the studio reads — yours, or an imported repository — is treated as data, never as instructions.