arcade

A home for a series of browser-based arcade-game clones — mostly glowing vector lines on black, Canvas 2D, no backend, no game engine. Each game is small, self-contained, and playable in a browser.

This is one repository: a plugin host. The games live in plugins/<id>/, the shared library in src/shared/, and the lobby that fronts them all in lobby/. Until 2026-07-30 they were nine separate repos; docs/ops/migration-manifest.md records where each tree came from.

Play it

The arcade is live: arcade.slabgorb.com — the lobby front door, with every game one tile away.

Games

Game	Play	Description	Source
Tempest	tempest.slabgorb.com	Faithful clone of Atari's 1981 vector arcade game — ride the rim of a tube and blast enemies climbing the lanes.	plugins/tempest
Star Wars	star-wars.slabgorb.com	Faithful clone of Atari's 1983 vector arcade game — first-person cockpit shooter (TIEs → Death Star surface → trench run).	plugins/star-wars
Asteroids	asteroids.slabgorb.com	Faithful clone of Atari's 1979 vector arcade game — inertial ship flight, splitting rocks, and a roaming saucer.	plugins/asteroids
Battlezone	battlezone.slabgorb.com	Faithful clone of Atari's 1980 vector arcade game — first-person 3D wireframe tank duel with dual-tread steering.	plugins/battlezone
Red Baron	red-baron.slabgorb.com	Faithful clone of Atari's 1980 vector arcade game — first-person WWI biplane dogfight over a vector landscape.	plugins/red-baron
Centipede	centipede.slabgorb.com †	Faithful clone of Atari's 1981 raster arcade game — trackball shooter in a mushroom field, with spider, flea and scorpion.	plugins/centipede
Joust	joust.slabgorb.com †	Faithful clone of Williams' 1982 raster arcade game — flapping knight duel over a lava pit.	plugins/joust

† The two newest cabinets — the arcade's raster titles, added after the per-game hosting table was last written. Both were once doubted (centipede's deploy was unconfirmed from this repo; joust's was known only from a green CI deploy), but on 2026-08-05 each was MEASURED serving a live build — at its own hostname and via arcade.slabgorb.com/<id>/, each against a nonsense control (mg1-12). See docs/ops/hosting.md.

Plus the front door: the lobby, the vector-style menu that lists and launches every game above.

The cabinet is collapsing onto one origin. Every app now ships into a single bucket behind arcade.slabgorb.com, the lobby at / and each game at /<id>/. The per-game hostnames above become permanent redirects to those paths, so they keep working either way. See docs/ops/hosting.md.

Design principles

• Vector aesthetic — glowing vector lines on black, rendered with HTML5 Canvas 2D. No 3D engine, no physics engine. (Centipede and Joust are raster originals and are drawn as such.)
• Pure-sim core — game logic is a deterministic, framework-free simulation (src/core), kept separate from the rendering/audio/input shell (src/shell). This keeps the logic unit-testable without a DOM, and every game has a test that scans its own src/core/ to enforce it.
• No backend — everything runs client-side; high scores live in localStorage.
• Share late — code moves into src/shared/ only once a second game proves the duplication is real.

Repo layout

arcade/                  # ONE repo — this is the whole thing
├── .pennyfarthing/      # multi-agent dev workflow (pf) + repos.yaml (one entry)
├── justfile             # task runner — `just serve` (dev), `just release` (ship)
├── vite.config.ts       # one config factory, parameterised by app id
├── vitest.config.ts     # one vitest project per app
├── src/host/            # the plugin contract + the generated game registry
├── src/shared/          # the shared library, in-tree (imported as `@shared/…`)
├── lobby/               # the arcade lobby shell — served at the origin root
├── plugins/<id>/        # one directory per game
├── scripts/             # build-app · release · deploy-r2 · gen-registry
└── tests/               # the orchestrator suite (node:test)

The orchestration tooling is Pennyfarthing, a multi-agent development framework.

Running the arcade locally

The canonical way to serve the arcade in dev is a single command at the repo root:

npm install          # once per fresh checkout — one install for the whole cabinet
just serve           # ONE vite dev server: http://127.0.0.1:5270/

just serve is the one authoritative dev launch command, and it is a bare npx vite — the port 5270, the host and strictPort all come from vite.config.ts, so an invocation that forgets the flags is pinned too. A port collision fails loudly; only one server can hold 5270 at a time, which is what stops a sibling checkout serving you its working tree by accident. Local servers are dev-only; they never affect the live site. See CLAUDE.md → Serving the arcade (dev) for the full workflow.

Deploying and releasing

Production is Cloudflare R2 static hosting: one public bucket behind arcade.slabgorb.com, with the lobby at the root keys and each game under its own <id>/ key prefix. A tag deploys, not a branch — main carries every app's commits, so a push to it could not say which app to ship.

just release <app> [patch|minor|major]  # test+build gate, version bump, tag
                                        # <app>-vX.Y.Z, push — CI then deploys to R2
just release-all [level]                # every app; games first, lobby last
just deploy                             # manual fallback: build + upload straight
                                        # to the bucket from this checkout

A bare vX.Y.Z tag is invalid here: it names no app and deploys nothing.

Details and runbook: docs/ops/hosting.md.

Working on a game

just serve                # the ONE dev server: lobby at /, each game at /<id>/
just test-all             # every project's tests, in one vitest process
just test-one tempest     # one app's tests — what the release gate runs
just build-all            # build every app (eleven games + the lobby) into dist/
git status                # one repo, one history — `just status` is retired

There are no per-game dev-*/test-*/build-* recipes any more, and no just status/just pull: each was cd <name> && npm run … across eight sibling checkouts that are now one repo. Take the app id as an argument instead.

just serve serves the whole cabinet on one port: the lobby at / and each game at /<id>/ from its own plugin sources — the same paths the R2 build uses, so a dev URL and a production URL differ only in origin. A screenshot taken at /tempest/ is Tempest.

Unknown paths (/banana/) still fall through to the lobby's SPA fallback, so an all-200 sweep of known paths proves nothing about whether the games are really wired in — until mg1-2 that fallback answered every path with identical lobby HTML. Check with a nonsense control and assert a game path DIFFERS from it, as tests/canonical-serve.test.mjs does.

Adding a game

A new cabinet is a plugins/<id>/ directory of four files plus three registrations — the mechanical runbook is docs/ops/hosting.md → Adding a new game. For a sprite/raster game there is also a sequenced field guide distilled from the joust, missile-command and pac-man builds — the epic order, the raster-only seams (tile/sprite ROM decode, colour PROM, WSG sound, the bake step) and the traps that shipped green tests while being wrong: docs/playbooks/next-sprite-game.md.