GAME LAB

A personal pile of frontend things — games mostly, plus a few sites and small tools I wrote because I wanted them to exist. Everything you can click in the live index runs straight in the browser: no install, no account, no build step on your side.

It is also a scratchpad for a recurring question — how far can one HTML file go? The horror game, one survivor and one of the stage plays are each a single file with zero dependencies, and eleven plays were each directed by a different coding agent from the same one-line brief.

🔗 https://xanthanl.github.io/game-lab/ · 中文说明

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Play

	What it is	Path
奇点回响 Singularity Echo	Inertia-drift asteroid-belt survival roguelike: three starting hulls, rocks split when shattered, twenty enemy types — including tadpole swarms that turn faster, hit harder and arrive in bigger clumps every wave — and a build picked one-of-three per level from 27 modules that level up to LV6, each maxing into a gold breakthrough upgrade; boost, repair and overdrive pickups spawn on the field. Offscreen targets glow as faint same-color dots on the screen edge; ESC opens a pause panel with the full build and stats plus a restart; runs auto-cache and resume after a refresh or close. A colossus boss — Mother Rock, Void Eye, Twin Rocks, Hydra Prime, Orbital Warden or Nemesis — rises every 5th wave; clearing wave 30 opens endless drift. A 260 KB page with procedural WebAudio, a vendored particle engine and an adapted WebGL fluid nebula that sheds its own layers when a GPU can't keep up; keyboard + mouse or touch.	/singularity-echo/
微软大战代码 Microsoft vs. Code	A meme-born PvZ parody with the whole meta-game ported to programmer lore: 5 chapters × 2 levels, each chapter a computing scenario (offline mode, merge-conflict waterway, legacy-code fog, a CORS wall where only lobbed bug reports work), 11 cards, 11 enemies, star drops, an npm shop run by the rubber duck, a side-project garden watered with git commit, a per-row Ctrl+Z rescue, and a mobile card dock.	/microsoft-vs-code/
植物大战僵尸 Plants vs Zombies	Full recreation: 23 levels, 6 worlds, 26 plants, 17 zombies, 2 bosses, sun economy and wave pacing. Every sprite is drawn in vector code — not one game image in the folder.	/PVZ/
强渡火星 Forcing Mars	Slay-the-Spire-like deckbuilder: 30 cards, 12 relics, 6 potions, 4 classes, descending 3 layers from the Martian surface to a 2,000 m core. Real ending, bilingual.	/forcing-mars/
咒 · 怨宅 JYU / Cursed House	First-person Chinese horror. 5 chapters / 6 maps, a DDA raycaster, and a ghost with BFS pathfinding, view cones and hearing that sharpens as the ritual progresses. Wardrobe hiding, breath-holding, procedural WebAudio. Ships with touch controls.	/cursed-house/
欧陆风云 · 1444 Europa 1444	Browser grand strategy on a hand-drawn Europe / North Africa / Anatolia map: 60+ countries at the 1444 bookmark, economy, diplomacy, war, sieges and historical events. Static, no build.	/europa/
Vampire 2D	Top-down auto-attacking survival: 5 weapons, 6 passives, choose-one-on-level-up, bosses from 180 s and a Blood Frenzy event, 220 enemies on screen. A 45 KB single file; keyboard + mouse.	/Vampire-2D/

Watch

	What it is	Path
像素舞台剧 · 十一部 Persona	One brief issued verbatim to 11 coding agents — "create a subfolder and implement a pixel-art animated stage play in the frontend, script to performance, entirely frontend" — and 11 answers: 5 adapt Three-Body, 5 independently put a lamp in the dark, 1 goes to a monster night market. 892 to 2,219 lines each.	/persona/
ASCII ∴ LAB	Turns Chinese or Latin text into ASCII art: 6 fonts (incl. CJK faces), 4 glyph styles, 6 stroke sets (classic ramp, blocks, brush strokes, braille), with adjustable output width, gamma and threshold. Copy as image, save PNG, or copy plain text.	/ascii-art/

Use

	What it is	Path
树言 · 旅记 Shuyan Travel	A private travel timeline: 53 long-form entries across 53 places — eight years of driving, then two years and a month walking the south-west → north-east diagonal from Yubeng to Hegang. Route map drawn with a locally vendored Leaflet.	/shuyan-travel/
Electric Mirage	Singles page for music released under the name XanthanL: 5 tracks streamed in place with buffer probing, retry, seek and auto-advance, bilingual. Also hosts Choir of Static, a track synthesized from scratch in numpy, with its own Web Audio visualizer.	/XanthanLMusic/dist/
金价观象台 Golden Wind	Gold dashboard, statically exported from Next.js: live quote, moving averages and golden/death-cross markers via lightweight-charts.	/golden-wind/out/
ARH — Ideology Coordinate Test	A 7-axis spectrum quiz in three lengths — 30 / 65 / 95 questions.	/ARH/dist/

Per-project docs

This file is the index; the detail stays where it belongs. Four documents survive inside their projects and are worth opening:

Doc	What's in it
PVZ/README.md	The real manual: controls table, responsive/devicePixelRatio layout strategy, draw-call and gradient-cache performance notes, how to plug in a CC0 sprite atlas, node test/smoke.js
forcing-mars/README.md	Not a manual — the game's story text, layer by layer down to 2000 m
XanthanLMusic/musics/README.md	Choir of Static: the numpy synthesis spec — timbre list, structure, mastering chain
persona/<agent>-<model>-<title>/README.md	6 of the 11 plays carry their own notes, written by the agent that made them

Layout

game-lab/
├── index.html            the index above — typographic, no images, bilingual (中文/EN)
├── 404.html              Pages 404
├── assets/               shared stylesheet, shared i18n, share-card generator, site og image
├── cursed-house/         single-file raycast horror        (static)
├── forcing-mars/         Phaser 3 deckbuilder              (static, CDN)
├── PVZ/                  canvas tower defense              (static)
├── microsoft-vs-code/    meme parody tower defense         (static)
├── Vampire-2D/           single-file survivor              (static)
├── singularity-echo/   asteroid survival, vendored FX    (static)
├── europa/               1444 grand strategy               (static)
├── persona/              11 pixel stage plays + sub-index  (static)
├── ascii-art/            ASCII text studio                 (static)
├── shuyan-travel/        travel timeline + map             (static, Leaflet vendored)
├── XanthanLMusic/        music site  → dist/ committed     (Vite + React 19)
├── golden-wind/          gold dashboard → out/ committed   (Next.js static export)
└── ARH/                  7-axis ideology quiz (30/65/95 questions) → dist/ committed (Vite + React)

The static folders need nothing but a server; anything ending in dist/ or out/ is a committed build artifact — see Deploying.

Running locally

Serve the folder containing this repo, not the repo itself — that way your local URLs carry the same /game-lab/ prefix Pages gives them:

cd ..                              # 到仓库的上一级
python -m http.server 8000
# → http://localhost:8000/game-lab/                首页
# → http://localhost:8000/game-lab/cursed-house/   任意子项目

This matters for golden-wind: its Next export hard-codes /game-lab/golden-wind/out/_next/..., so serving the repo root as the document root gives you a dashboard with every stylesheet and chunk 404ing — the page opens, but looks broken. Everything else uses relative paths and survives either way.

The single-file games (cursed-house, Vampire-2D) and ascii-art have no external assets at all, and singularity-echo keeps its one dependency vendored beside the page — double-clicking any of their index.html over file:// also just works, handy when you only want to play.

For the three build-based projects, install and rebuild in their own folder:

cd ARH            && npm install && npm run build   # → ARH/dist
cd XanthanLMusic  && npm install && npm run build   # → XanthanLMusic/dist
cd golden-wind    && npm install && npm run build   # → golden-wind/out

Deploying

.github/workflows/pages.yml publishes the repository root as-is on every push to main. That single fact drives three conventions, and breaking any of them 404s a subproject:

1. Artifacts are committed, not built in CI. ARH/dist, XanthanLMusic/dist and golden-wind/out are in the tree on purpose — their .gitignores deliberately do not ignore them. Edit a source, rebuild, commit both.
2. Base paths are pinned to the /game-lab/ subpath. ARH and XanthanLMusic build with Vite base: './' (relative, so any mount point works); golden-wind must keep basePath: '/game-lab/golden-wind/out' in next.config.mjs, matching where out/ actually lands. Next.js cannot resolve relative asset URLs, so that literal has to stay in sync.
3. .nojekyll must stay. Pages runs Jekyll over the artifact otherwise, and Jekyll silently drops _next/ — the whole dashboard would deploy looking empty.

Share cards: python assets/gen_share_cards.py redraws the 600×800 og.png posters (needs Pillow + numpy) referenced by the horror / PVZ / Mars pages and the site itself.

Not in this repo

Anything that cannot run in a browser goes into a local-only/ folder at the repo root, which .gitignore excludes wholesale — never pushed, never deployed, never listed on the index. Currently that holds:

• Protocol Extract — a Godot 4.5 project (engine binary, shaders, scene assets).
• Minecraft — a Fabric Java mod (gradle caches, world saves, jars).

So the index you see is exactly the set of things that ship: if a row is on it, it is in the repo and live on Pages; if a project is not on it, it is not in the repo either.

Credits & notes

• Original code and writing, apart from: Forcing Mars art/audio produced from prompts (manifest in forcing-mars/ART_ASSETS.md), shuyan-travel vendoring Leaflet (BSD-2), and singularity-echo vendoring Proton (MIT) plus a nebula layer adapted from PavelDoGreat/WebGL-Fluid-Simulation (MIT).
• Plants vs Zombies here is a mechanics study with vector art drawn from scratch — no original assets are included.
• Singularity Echo began as a mechanics homage to Chasing Carrots' Nova Drift — all art is canvas-drawn code and all sound is synthesized in WebAudio; nothing is copied.
• The persona/ folders keep their agent and model names as issued; they are results, not branding.

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中文版说明见 README.zh-CN.md。