Games on the Big Screen
21 July 2026
We have wanted our games on the television for a while. A word search on a big screen with the whole family calling out answers is a genuinely different experience from the same puzzle on a phone, and the living room is where families actually sit together. The obstacle was simple and total: a television has no touchscreen, and every single thing we had built assumed a finger. You cannot tap a card with a remote control. It is worth being precise about what "on the TV" means here, because the phrase is vaguer than it sounds. We mean a television running Android TV or Google TV, whether that is built into the set or added by a streaming box or stick, driven by a remote that has a direction pad and a select button. A set running something else, or a stripped-down remote with little more than volume and channel keys, will not do.
What a remote gives you instead is a highlight, four arrows, and a button. Something on the screen is always selected and visibly glowing, the arrows move that glow around, and the button does whatever the glowing thing does. It sounds trivial until you realise it has to be true of every single element in the app. We built one shared piece of machinery for this and rebuilt our buttons, menus and boards on top of it, so that every control in every game is somewhere the highlight can land, and so that a highlighted control looks obviously highlighted from across a room.
The interesting work was in the games themselves, because "select a thing" means something different in each of them. Tic-Tac-Toe and Concentration were straightforward: move the cursor around the grid, press to choose. Sudoku needs two answers rather than one, a square and a number, so the number pad became a second area you can move into and back out of. Word Search needs a start and an end, so you press once on the first letter of the word and once on the last, and the game traces between them. Puzzles works like picking something up and putting it down: press to grab a piece from the tray, and the empty slots become places you can move to, scrolling into view as you go, so pressing again drops it in.
Mazes needed the most rethinking, since it was designed around physically tilting your device and a television does not tilt. Rather than bolt a second control scheme on quietly, we made the choice explicit: you now pick how you want to steer, whether that is tilting, an on-screen pad, or a controller, and the game tells you the option exists instead of hiding it in settings. We also pulled the marble's speed out of the difficulty setting and made it its own control, so a player who wants a slower marble no longer has to accept an easier maze to get one.
Alongside all this we adopted the conventions console players already know, so the Start button jumps to the pause control and the Back button opens the pause menu, which is what your hands expect them to do. And working this way turned up faults we could never have found with a finger: the parental gate, of all things, had a corner where the highlight could get in and not get back out. A player using a remote would have been stuck at the one screen specifically designed to protect them. It is now fixed, and we would not have known otherwise.
Which brings us to the part we did not plan. "Works without a touchscreen" and "works for someone who cannot reliably use a touchscreen" are the same requirement, and by solving the first we solved the second. Every game is now fully playable with a keyboard on a desktop, and with the kinds of switch and controller devices people use when a touchscreen is difficult. That was a side effect of chasing the living room, and honestly it is the better half of the result. We build for every platform we can reach because we do not want the device a family happens to own to decide whether their child is included. The same reasoning applies to the hands they happen to have.