title: We Built a Full Game IDE in a Browser Tab and Our CPU Barely Complained

We Built a Game IDE in the Browser and Lived to Brag About It

Hey, we're Evolved Tech — the crew behind Limn Studio, a browser-based game IDE where you can build, run, and publish 2D games without installing a single thing. No npm. No webpack. No 45-minute node_modules folder that somehow weighs more than the actual game. Just us, a browser, a questionable amount of caffeine, and an unreasonable number of tags.

You'll mostly hear from Kehinde and Desire in this one, but there's a wider crew behind the scenes at Evolved Tech who deserve just as much credit for keeping this thing running — you know who you are, thank you.

Somewhere along the way we also lost four hours to a bug that turned out to be a smart quote sneaking in from a pasted Google Doc. We're still not over it.

Grab a coffee. This is the full, slightly unhinged tour of everything we built, why we built it, and the one CPU-saving trick that finally stopped our animations from moving like they were wading through molasses.

Part 1: The Editor Shell (or: How to Build an IDE Out of Spite and s)

Here's a fun fact that will make actual frontend engineers wince: Limn Studio's editor is one HTML file. No framework. No build step. No bundler crying softly in the corner about peer dependencies. Just and tags, stacked like a JavaScript lasagna.

Why? Because every dependency you add is a tiny gremlin that wakes up in six months, demands a major version bump, and takes your whole app down over a null check nobody asked for. No gremlins allowed here. This thing deploys to any static host and will probably still run in 2040, long after everyone else's React app has dependency-rotted into digital compost.

The layout has four zones: a top bar, tabs, main content, and a floating action button that pops open like it's got somewhere important to be. Very dramatic. Very "we contain multitudes." Mobile: The Great Padding Massacre

Turns out, on a 380px phone screen, our lovely 24px of padding on each side of the editor was quietly eating 12% of the horizontal space. Twelve percent! That's not padding, that's a landlord. So on mobile we ripped out every border, radius, and ounce of breathing room and went full edge-to-edge. The editor now goes commando on small screens, and everyone's happier for it, especially the pixels.

Part 2: The Code Editor (Handmade, Like Artisanal Bread, But It's a Syntax Highlighter)

This is where we lost the most sleep. We did not build a mini Monaco. We do not have the staffing, the sanity budget, or frankly the will to live required for that. What exists instead is about 400 lines of vanilla JavaScript doing an extremely convincing impression of a real code editor, and getting away with it.

The trick: stack two elements directly on top of each other like a syntax-highlighting sandwich. • A on the bottom layer, rendering pretty colored tokens • A on top with the text made completely invisible (color: transparent), but…