We make mobile games for iOS and Android. Every sprite, sound and animation is generated in code rather than imported — which keeps the downloads small and lets us tune the feel down to the millisecond. The games are free, and the ads are something you choose to watch.
01 — THE BOARD
The studio is named after its own scoreboard. Every game we finish takes a lamp; the dark ones are simply not built yet. Pick a lit one.
Four of nine
Hover a lamp to see what lives in it. Click to read how it was built.
Read more →02 — HOW WE BUILD
Nine Lamps is a small studio in Sweden. Here is roughly how the games get made, in case you are curious about the parts nobody usually shows.
There are no PNG files, no sprite sheets and no audio clips in our projects. Blocks, spaceships, hotel façades and sound effects are all generated at runtime from a few hundred lines of maths. It started as a constraint and turned into the thing we like most about the work: a colour palette is one line to change, and a whole art style can be rethought in an afternoon.
The parts that decide whether a game is fair — a puzzle generator, an economy curve — are written as plain logic with no graphics attached, so they can be run thousands of times in a terminal. Sudoku Nio's generator is checked against fifty puzzles at a time for uniqueness and difficulty. Hotel Tycoon's economy was tuned by simulating four hundred days of play and looking at where progress stalled.
It is unglamorous, and it is the only reason we can promise that a puzzle is always solvable.
A puzzle piece that snaps to a new cell gives a short haptic tick, so the move is felt as well as seen. Clearing three lines shakes harder than clearing one. Combos raise the pitch of the sound rather than just the number on screen. These are the details we spend the most time on and the ones players never mention — which is usually a good sign.
No subscriptions, no locked levels, no energy meter that runs out when it gets interesting. Watching an ad is always optional and always gives you something extra, never something you needed. If a game is finished, it should be finished when you download it.
Nine Lamps is the games label. jakvab is the day job.
Apps, systems, custom SaaS and AI for companies — that side of the work lives at jakvab.