Pocket Casino
Solo retro pixel-art casino: roguelike poker, arcade blackjack and turbo roulette sharing one bankroll
Context
Design a solo, offline, account-free casino where three games (roguelike poker, blackjack, roulette) share a single bankroll, without falling into generic territory: genuinely crafted pixel-art direction rather than a surface theme, an economy where every dollar spent in one mode is felt in the others, and a game engine reliable enough to verify its own rules (basic strategy, bet balancing) through tests rather than blind trust.
Solution
Built a pure TypeScript game engine, fully separated from the UI: cards, poker scoring, blackjack settlement, roulette wheels and economy (bankroll, debt, tax) are tested functions with no DOM, which lets the rulebook display a strategy table generated by the engine itself rather than hand-copied. Fully home-made pixel art: hand-authored 16×16 sprites rendered as SVG, cards with properly laid-out pips (no Unicode glyphs), deterministic per-card tilt, and sound entirely synthesized via the Web Audio API. A 99-test suite covers the engine, bet balancing (full-game simulation) and the sprites' visual constraints.
Technical architecture
- Game EnginePure TypeScript logic (poker, blackjack, roulette, economy), deterministic mulberry32 RNG, tested with no DOM mounted
- UI & StateReact 18 and Zustand for state shared across the three tables (bankroll, inventory, trophies, local persistence)
- Art Direction & Audio16×16 pixel-art sprites rendered as SVG, drawn card pips, fully synthesized sound via the Web Audio API, no audio files or binary assets
Previews
Measured performance
- Performance90
- Accessibility100
- Best practices100
- SEO100
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