Captain Cool Club + Game Lab
A members' arcade that behaves like a game. A playable slot-machine hero, a day and night switch that transforms the scene, a shared coin wallet, and a lab of real browser games.
Captain Cool is a penguin sea-captain and this is his club. The homepage is already playable: a drawn slot machine pays Cool Coins, a mood switch flips the whole club between a pastel toy world and a neon casino trance, and the floor is a row of tilted cabinets under a marquee strip.
The Game Lab embeds two real games, COOL CITADEL and COOL SMASH, and a real win pays the wallet through a contract the hub validates. Not real gambling, not real money, labeled Concept throughout.
Stack
- Static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, no framework
- WebAudio synth, looped music, a localStorage wallet
- Embedded Vite-built games in iframes paying the hub through validated postMessage
- Firebase leaderboard with App Check
- Netlify with immutable asset caching
Decisions
- The day and night toggle is the second signature. One control, and animating the transition is itself the delight.
- Coins pay only on real player wins. Attract-mode fights never pay; jackpots scale with full-life and no-hit wins.
- Immutable asset caching means any content change ships under a new filename, no exceptions.
Lessons
- Generated "transparent" art often is not. A supplied slot-machine asset carried a baked-in checkerboard and had to be cut out before use.
- Sub-pixel transforms on an 8px pixel font render coarsely; alignment was verified with guide-line crops, not centroid math.