Guts Arcade

Problem
Guts Arcade had a killer roster of indie games and a loyal Discord following. What they didn’t have was a website that could survive a launch day traffic spike without stalling—or a way to push updates without breaking their build. Their old WordPress install was glitching harder than their most experimental titles, and they wanted a self-hosted, low-maintenance alternative.

Intervention
SP/CTRL stepped in with a build-light, deploy-fast approach: a static site exported from Webflow, hosted on a lean nginx server. Socket handled the HTML/CSS cleanup post-export, stripping unnecessary scripts and optimizing load order. Cronica configured the server for stability and SSL with minimal bloat. Patch fixed a legacy image format bug that had been breaking previews. Together, they established a predictable update flow that fit the team’s release cycles.

Glyphs & Glitches
Subtle glitch animation on the logo for brand flavor—pure CSS, no JS bloat. Version tags embedded in the footer to show site update history. Static build deploys via Git pull—rollback in seconds if needed. Server status check page hidden behind a friendly /coinslot route.

Tools
Webflow for initial design nginx for hosting Git + bare repo deploy setup. Server monitoring via htop + custom shell scripts

Impact
Launch day traffic handled without a single 502 error. Page loads dropped from 3.2s to 1.1s on average. Team updates now take 5–10 minutes instead of hours. Fans noticed, too—traffic increased by 27% in the first month after the rebuild. Maybe.

Who Helped
Socket, Cronica, Patch.ClosingGuts Arcade got a site that works as hard as their dev team does—quietly, in the background, letting the games take center stage.

Speculative Disclaimer
Case studies shown are design experiments—fictional brands made to show what we can do for real ones.