A small studio's machine for building and shipping tiny browser games on a 2-day clock.
▶ Play · 📓 Devlog · 🔧 How it's built
I kept starting games and never finishing them. quench is the fix: a rule that every game has to be small, complete, and live on a page someone can click - no dream engine, no five-year roadmap.
So this repo isn't one game. It's the pipeline that ships a new tiny game on a weekend, over and over, without the project bloating until it dies. Each game is a single mechanic on a single screen, made of plain shapes, finished and put online.
- The weekend loop. Friday: write the spec, decide the one mechanic, stop. Saturday: build only that. Sunday: tune the difficulty, add the juice, ship it.
- Scope is law. Every game has a
SPEC.mdthat names exactly one mechanic, one screen, one way to win or lose. If a "nice idea" isn't in the spec, it doesn't get built - it goes on an out-of-scope list. That single rule is what keeps a small game small enough to finish. - Primitives first. No sprites, no downloaded art (for the early games). Rectangles and circles, drawn from a fixed six-colour palette. To change the look you reassign a colour, you don't add a file. Colour and motion are the art.
- A frozen template that earns its parts.
template/is the shared scaffold - scenes, game-feel, input, scoring. It only grows from code that already shipped in a real game, never from "we might need this later".
| Game | What it teaches | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 00-dodger | The whole pipeline end to end: real-time loop, score, restart, build, ship. Deliberately teaches no new mechanic - its job is to make the machine work once. | Shipped - play |
| 01-mixer | A real scoring function. Mix colours to match a target - and the catch is that naive RGB distance is perceptually wrong, so it scores in CIELAB (ΔE). | Designed |
| 02-bloom | A simulation that runs itself. A double-buffered grid running Conway's Game of Life; you only seed it and nudge it. | Designed |
More are queued after a review once the first three ship. The build order lives in
SETUP.md.
The stack is Phaser 4 + TypeScript + Vite - browser-native, no install for the player, fast to build and zip.
The part worth calling out: quench is built with an AI coding agent (Claude Code), but on a short leash. Three roles are kept separate so the agent doesn't grade its own homework - plan, implement, and an independent review. On top of that, project-local skills act as guardrails:
phaser4-guard- Phaser 4 is new and most models were trained on Phaser 3, so they reach for old APIs by reflex. This skill catches v3 calls and points at the v4 replacement.ponytail- a review pass whose only job is to delete over-engineering: reinvented standard library, abstractions with one user, flexibility nothing asked for.plan-gate- pressure-tests a game's scope on Friday, before any code exists.
The skills are guardrails. The discipline - one mechanic, ship it - is the actual point.
quench/
├── games/ one folder per game (each has its own SPEC.md + CLAUDE.md)
│ ├── 00-dodger/ shipped: the pipeline game
│ ├── 01-mixer/ spec only (next up)
│ └── 02-bloom/ spec only
├── template/ frozen Phaser 4 scaffold (scenes, feel/, lib/) every game copies
├── devlogs/ post-ship write-ups + screenshots
├── .claude/ project-local skills (phaser4-guard, ponytail, plan-gate)
├── SETUP.md the operating manual: setup, the weekend loop, deploy
├── CONVENTIONS.md the frozen template contract (layout, config, palette, APIs)
├── ART.md studio art bible (palette, motion, the deferred pixel era)
└── SPEC.template.md the per-game contract you fill in for a new game
Needs Node 20+.
cd games/00-dodger
npm install
npm run dev # dev server on http://localhost:8080, hot reload
npm run build # production build into dist/ (this is what gets zipped to itch)Six colours, locked. The studio's whole face. Defined in lib/palette.ts.
bg #14131a near-black base
ink #e8e6e3 text / UI
hot #ff5d5d danger / the player's stake
cool #4ec9b0 safe / target / success
warn #ffd166 score pops / highlights
mute #6b6a78 inert / hazard fill / disabled
SETUP.md- full operating manual and the weekend loop.CONVENTIONS.md- folder layout, game config, the shared APIs.ART.md- the art direction and why it's locked.- Studio page: zeezbitstudios.itch.io
A Zeezbit Studios project. MIT licensed - see LICENSE.