Button Kin Games is a one-woman indie tabletop roleplaying game studio based in Prestwich, Manchester, run by Yvris Burke. The studio produces solo journaling games, a reality TV TTRPG called Drama Llamas, a regency horror game in development, and a handful of other titles, and the site needs to handle all of it: selling games, booking playtest sessions, posting updates, and reflecting the care that goes into the games themselves.
What's on the site
The site runs on the Chobble Template, an Eleventy-based static site system developed by Chobble CIC for small business websites. Eleventy is a static site generator - the site is built as flat HTML files at deploy time, which means no database, no server-side processing, and a minimal attack surface. The pages load quickly because there's nothing to compute when someone visits.
The content lives in Markdown and YAML files. Each game is a Markdown file with YAML frontmatter for the price, player count, and other metadata; push to the repo and the site rebuilds and deploys automatically via GitHub Actions. It's hosted on Bunny CDN, which serves everything from the edge. Lighthouse scores sit in the 95+ range across all four categories, which is a useful rough indicator of performance and accessibility.
The site uses the template's block-based design system, where each page is assembled from composable sections - hero banners, split-image layouts, feature grids, galleries, embedded storefronts - all declared in YAML frontmatter rather than hardcoded into a template file. For Button Kin, this means the homepage can have a hero block, then a split-image introducing the studio, then a card grid of featured games, then a newsletter signup, all without touching HTML. It's content configuration rather than page templating, which works well for solo studios because rearranging and adding blocks doesn't require understanding the underlying code.
Playtest bookings with Chobble Tickets
The Custom of the Sea - the regency horror game currently in development - runs regular playtest sessions, and those need booking. Chobble Tickets is an open-source (AGPLv3) ticket reservation system that handles free and paid events, attendee management with QR code check-in, Apple Wallet and Google Wallet pass generation, and a public JSON API for programmatic access. For Button Kin's purposes it's handling free playtest sign-ups, but the system also supports Stripe and Square for paid events.
The integration is straightforward: the Button Kin site links through to tickets.buttonkin.com for bookings. Chobble Tickets also supports iframe and script-based embedding for keeping the booking flow on-site, but for this use case outbound links keep things simple.
Per-game theming
Each game page on the Button Kin site carries its own custom theme - distinct background images, colour palettes, and typography overrides that match the game's aesthetic. Drama Llamas gets a pink and purple palette with a repeating llama pattern. Caltrop Kaiju goes full dark mode with neon green text on black. The Custom of the Sea switches to dark teal and gold for the maritime horror feel. Jude's World is soft lavender and teal. Bumbling is subtle pastel with a barely-there bee pattern.
These themes are implemented through CSS classes scoped to each game's URL slug, with custom background images replacing the default dice-corner artwork on each page. Alex created all the custom CSS and background images herself - the templates provide the structure, and the site owner brings the personality that makes each product page feel like its own world rather than a templated listing.
Third-party integrations
The site connects to a handful of external services without becoming dependent on any of them:
- Stripe for direct product sales - payment links are embedded on each product page, with customers selecting postage during checkout
- Itch.io for digital distribution - some games have embedded Itch.io widgets, others link out
- DriveThruRPG and DM's Guild for D&D 5e adventures, reaching a different audience
- Buttondown for the newsletter ("The Button Kin Times", published monthly)
- Formspark with Botpoison for the contact form - spam protection without a CAPTCHA
- YouTube for gameplay videos embedded via privacy-respecting nocookie URLs
Each integration does one thing, and the site would continue to function if any of them went away. The Stripe links are just URLs in the Markdown. The Itch.io widgets are iframes. The newsletter signup is a form post. Nothing is architecturally coupled, which keeps the site resilient.
SEO and performance
Static sites have a natural advantage for search engine rankings because they load quickly and present crawlable HTML rather than client-rendered JavaScript. The Chobble Template also generates JSON-LD structured data for each content type - Product schema on game pages, BlogPosting schema on newsletter entries, Organization schema sitewide - giving search engines structured information about what's on each page.
The image pipeline uses Eleventy's responsive image processing with WebP generation, srcset attributes for multiple viewport widths, and base64 low-quality image placeholders (LQIP) to eliminate layout shift. The page structure stays stable while images load, which is one of those small things that makes a site feel solid.
Sitemap, RSS feed, and canonical URLs are all generated automatically.
Open source
Both the Chobble Template and Chobble Tickets are open source under AGPLv3. The Button Kin site source code is also available. Clients can see exactly what's running on their site, the work is auditable, and if circumstances change someone else can pick up the code and carry on. Vendor transparency through open licensing is a core principle of how Chobble operates.
Technical summary
- Static site built with Eleventy and the Chobble Template
- Block-based page composition from YAML frontmatter
- Per-game custom theming with CSS and background images
- Chobble Tickets integration for playtest event bookings
- Stripe, Itch.io, DriveThruRPG, and DM's Guild for sales
- Bunny CDN hosting with GitHub Actions CI/CD
- Responsive images with WebP, srcset, and LQIP
- JSON-LD structured data, sitemap, and RSS feed generation
- All source code available under AGPLv3
Chobble CIC builds sites like this for small businesses, artists, charities, and sole traders across Greater Manchester and beyond. A site built on the Chobble Template with this level of feature coverage typically takes between 5 and 15 hours depending on customisation, and hosting starts at £20/month with monitoring and support included. Find out more at chobble.com.
