An account you don't need

The first time you open a Neon Labs game, it asks you to sign in. Right under that sits a second button: Play — no account. That second button is the one I expect most people to press.

Install, play, close

These games are meant to be a short break from everything around you. A queue at the post office, five minutes between two meetings, a waiting room. You install, you play, you close.

Signing up for every game like that makes no sense. You would spend as long filling in the form as you would playing the game you filled it in for.

So there is no form in the way. The whole game is yours without an account: no time limit, nothing locked away until you sign up. An early version of guest play gave you five minutes and then asked for your email. I took it out a few days later. A game nobody can try is a game nobody plays.

Once, for every game

Sometimes you do want more. You get a new phone and want your record to come with you. You want to see where you stand against other players, or play Neon XO online against a friend. That is when an account starts to pay for itself.

And then you make it once. It is a Neon Network account, and the same login works in Neon XO, Neon Comet and Neon Shift, and in every game after them. Sign in with Apple, Google or an email address. Your player name comes with you from game to game.

Your time as a guest isn’t wasted either. In Neon Comet and Neon Shift, your best run moves over to the new account.

A short job list

An account in our games does four things:

• Keeps your record across phones: your high score, or your wins, losses and draws in Neon XO.
• Puts you on the leaderboards.
• Gives you a name to play under online.
• Holds your purchases. Leave a tip in one game and the Supporter badge shows in every game that uses Neon Network, not just the one you bought it in.

It also means two kinds of email from us, and only two: one to confirm your address, and a password reset when you ask for one. No newsletter, no “we miss you”.

One account, one delete

A shared account has a price, and I would rather say it here than in small print. Delete your account in any of the games and it is gone from all of them: your login, your name, your scores everywhere. The delete screen says so and makes you wait a few seconds before the button works. After that, nobody at Neon Labs can bring it back.

The app without one

Ariadne has no account at all, and that’s on purpose. An account is for carrying something from phone to phone and for measuring yourself against other people. Ariadne has nothing to carry, because your path never leaves your phone, and there is nobody to beat. Asking my dad to sign up for something just to find his way back would be one more place to get stuck.

That is the rule for everything we make: an account shows up when it has a job to do for you, and not before.

Install, play, close. The account can wait.

— Kamil