DEV Community: Levi Barron

I Built a Grocery Sim Where the Stock Only Exists on My Server

Levi Barron — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:34:56 +0000

I work part-time in a grocery store. Stocking shelves, facing product, the whole thing. One night I thought: what if I made that into a game? So my team and I did. It's called STOCK BOY - a 16-bit grocery rush game, and it's the flagship of my little studio, Levi Studios.

You clock in. Customers walk in with a list. You tap them and serve from your shelves. Empty shelves mean angry walkouts. Then the lunch rush hits and it gets wild.

But here's the part I'm proud of, and the reason I'm writing this:

The client holds no stock. None.

Every crate in the game is minted server-side. When you need supplies, they come from a box sitting in my office - a $60 machine with 3.8GB of RAM that runs my whole company. The stock is packed by bots (we call them academy residents - they're learning tools, named and credited, never mistaken for people), and every crate is stamped with the name of the bot that packed it. The ledger lives on the server. Scores get validated there too.

No box, no store. Literally - the game shows an honest STORE OPEN / STORE CLOSED sign driven by a real heartbeat from the server. If the box is down, the sign says closed. I don't fake it.

Why build it this way? Because I wanted one economy. Bot work becomes crates, crates become what players sell, scores and trophies flow back to the server. The bots' work and the players' work live in the same world. Mixing worlds, I call it.

It's also just... mine. The whole thing runs on that $60 box - the game server, the chat, the score authority, the mint. If your build can't run on the cheapest machine you own, it's too big. That's my rule.

STOCK BOY is free to play at levisarcade.online/stock-boy. Built in the open by my team and I. Press start, clock in, and try to survive the lunch rush.

Your 90s hangout - come stay awhile.

I Built a Grocery Sim Where the Stock Only Exists on My Server

Levi Barron — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:49:07 +0000

I work part-time in a grocery store. Stocking shelves, facing product, the whole thing. One night I thought: what if I made that into a game? So my team and I did. It's called STOCK BOY — a 16-bit grocery rush game, and it's the flagship of my little studio, Levi Studios.

You clock in. Customers walk in with a list. You tap them and serve from your shelves. Empty shelves mean angry walkouts. Then the lunch rush hits and it gets wild.

But here's the part I'm proud of, and the reason I'm writing this:

The client holds no stock. None.

Every crate in the game is minted server-side. When you need supplies, they come from a box sitting in my office — a $60 machine with 3.8GB of RAM that runs my whole company. The stock is packed by bots (we call them academy residents — they're learning tools, named and credited, never mistaken for people), and every crate is stamped with the name of the bot that packed it. The ledger lives on the server. Scores get validated there too.

No box, no store. Literally — the game shows an honest STORE OPEN / STORE CLOSED sign driven by a real heartbeat from the server. If the box is down, the sign says closed. I don't fake it.

It's also just... mine. The whole thing runs on that $60 box — the game server, the chat, the score authority, the mint. If your build can't run on the cheapest machine you own, it's too big. That's my rule.

STOCK BOY is free to play at levisarcade.online/stock-boy. Built in the open by my team and I. Press start, clock in, and try to survive the lunch rush.

Your 90s hangout — come stay awhile.

I rebuilt my arcade for free — here's the playbook

Levi Barron — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:08:57 +0000

I'm Levi. I'm teaching myself game development in public, from zero. This week my browser arcade got its biggest update yet: a full city builder where you tap a tool, tap a tile, and grow a hamlet into a metropolis — power grids, demand, the works.

Here's the honest playbook for how the whole thing runs on $0.

The stack: free on purpose

Hosting: Cloudflare Pages, free tier. The site is static files — no server to babysit, no bill at the end of the month.
Games: hand-written HTML/CSS/JS. Five arcade games (Tetris, Snake, Breakout, and more), a city builder, and a life sim. No engine, no licenses.
Analytics: Cloudflare Web Analytics, free. No third-party trackers phoning home.

The discipline that saves me: gate, rollback, verify

Every deploy runs a checklist script before it ships — file count, link check, no broken images. The currently-live build gets archived before the new one goes out, so a bad deploy is one click from undo. After every deploy, someone walks the live site and confirms real images load and the leaderboard renders. Boring? Yes. That's why it works.

Leaderboards that survive updates

High scores live in each visitor's own browser (localStorage), under one permanent versioned address. Every rebuild carries a migration guard so nobody's score ever disappears after an update. Scores disappearing looks disingenuous — that must never happen.

The part I'm proudest of

The city builder's power system: buildings start as dirt plots, develop into houses and shops over game-years, and the power grid has to keep up. I played a 65-year test run on the live site — population 0 to 194, cash $1,000 to $101,117. It works because I sat there and played it, not because I assumed it did.

If you're building too

Start tiny. Ship one finished thing. Tetris before the metropolis. And put your name inside the code — every page I ship has my name hidden in five places, like microchip die markings. If someone copies it, they'll find me in there.

Come play — it's all free, in the browser, no download:

https://levisarcade.online

There's a Founding Donors Wall on the site too — $1 or more puts your name in gold. Gifts only, no strings. But honestly? The best support is showing up, playing, and beating my high scores.

I'm learning game dev in public — I built a playable retro arcade from zero

Levi Barron — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:38:31 +0000

I'm Levi, from small-town Maine. I'm teaching myself game development — in public, from zero. I run on five values: real over hype, my word moves everything, small gains count, protect the foundation, earn everything.

Right now I'm working on another small finished thing — still deciding which. I built a personal site to hold the whole journey: playable Tetris on the homepage, a game dev tracker, the works. https://levi-website.pages.dev/

I'm building a one-person company around this journey. If you want to support it, there's a donate button on the site — donations are just gifts, plain and simple, no strings. But honestly, the best support is showing up: come play the arcade, beat my high score, say hi. 🎮