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:
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.
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