Build an Arcade Game

What this book is

Narrower than the name suggests, and more interesting

"Multi-level arcade game" conjures a specific picture: a life counter ticking down, power-ups scattered across hand-designed stages, a score climbing against an opponent. This book's real worked example has none of that. It has something narrower and, in its own way, more interesting: a canvas Pong variant, live today at a real URL, whose entire difficulty curve comes from one number — how many times the ball has hit a paddle — layered underneath a second, stranger system that ties the game's speed to a live cryptocurrency price feed.

Lives, power-ups, and a score kept against a second player are all absent — a real design choice worth understanding rather than a gap to apologize for. A miss doesn't end anything; the ball respawns, a particle effect fires, and play continues. The entire arc of the game is a single climbing number: land enough hits, and the game gets faster, the background gets busier, and eventually you win. Every claim in this book is checked directly against the running game — fetched from its live URL, cross-referenced against its own source, and reconciled against a public GitHub repository holding the same code.

What you’ll learn

Six chapters, from the render loop to shipping honestly

• the-render-loop — The loop that drives everything else, the piece every other chapter assumes is already running.
• game-state — The state machine governing what the player can do at any moment.
• collision-detection — The angle-based physics that make a bounce feel right.
• the-hit-driven-level-system — The counter-driven system that turns paddle hits into difficulty, and the real win condition at a specific level.
• the-price-feed-speed-dial — A live price feed layered on top of the difficulty system, raising two genuinely open design questions.
• shipping-without-a-deploy-pipeline — The real gap between "this is live" and "there's a repeatable way to make it live again."
• conclusion — A single lesson about scope, pulling the whole thing together.

From the book

A preview

That's a complete, shippable game. It just isn't the arcade convention the phrase "multi-level" usually implies.

Who it’s for

Anyone building a real, shippable game by hand

This is for anyone building a real, shippable game by hand with Claude who wants to see what a deliberately narrow scope actually buys — and what it costs when a live system's true behavior turns out to be messier than the pitch.

A longer excerpt is available to newsletter subscribers.

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