< START COMMITS BUILD LOG

HOW I
BUILT IT

Hogg Squash is a squash game for the Hogg Middle School Razorbacks that plays in any web browser. It’s my GT Capstone project.

My guiding question: How can AI tools help one student research, design and build a complete video game?

I research, plan, play-test and make the decisions; Claude Code writes the code. The game is built in small steps. Each step is a short work session that ends with a commit: a saved change on GitHub. Between some steps I play-test the game and decide what to fix next.

This log is my process record. It reads every commit straight from GitHub, so it’s always up to date, and old versions stay playable so you can see how the game grew.

All the code is open on GitHub. See how it works, or fork it and make your own version →

THE TOOLS

  • Claude

    AI help: researching the 1992 arcade game, planning the build, and answering questions along the way.

  • Claude Code

    The AI coding assistant that wrote the game and this website, one session at a time.

  • Cloudflare

    Registers the roninray.com domain and hosts the game and this site.

  • GitHub

    Stores the code and every change to it. This page reads its log from there.

  • SpriteCook

    AI pixel-art generator for the player sprites and their animations.

  • Aseprite

    Pixel-art editor for cleaning up the sprites: colors, sizes and exporting the animations.

THE LOG

Jump to the latest step ↓

  1. R RESEARCH

    Researching the 1992 arcade game

    Oct 18, 2026 · done with Claude, before any code

    1. Picked Gaelco's Squash (1992) as the model and read up on it: first to 9 points, HARD and SOFT shots, 8 players and a tournament.

      Oct 18 · Research the original game

    2. Found out what the original runs on: a 1992 arcade board with a Motorola 68000 processor, running code written for that chip alone.

      Oct 18 · The original's hardware

    3. Pulled the graphics and sound clips out of the game's ROM to study, for reference only.

      Oct 18 · ROM graphics and sound extracted

    4. Ran the real game in an arcade emulator with a robot player to confirm the rules and measure the ball's speed.

      Oct 18 · MAME test runs

    5. Decompiled the game's code to find the exact ball physics, shots and computer opponent.

      Oct 18 · Ghidra decompile

      Technical notes
      - Ghidra 12.1.3 on the 68000 program ROM
- Turned the arcade's machine code back into readable code
- Found the ball physics, shot tables, CPU "ghost ball" predictor and difficulty tables

    6. Chose JavaScript, the language every web browser runs, so Hogg Squash is a complete rewrite that plays on any computer, tablet or phone with nothing to install.

      Oct 18 · Platform: browser and JavaScript

    7. Rebuilt the ball physics in JavaScript and checked it against about 30,000 frames of the real game, with zero error.

      Oct 18 · Physics core and tests

      Technical notes
      - 16.16 fixed-point maths like the original, so every browser gets identical results
- 458 ball flights, 29,634 frames: zero error
- 244 / 244 shot choices identical
- Moved into the game repo in adb444c

    8. Wrote design notes on what to keep, what to change and what to leave out.

      Oct 18 · Design notes

PLAY OLD VERSIONS

UP NEXT

    Source: Ray-Ronin/hogg-squash.