MARQUEE
My own full-stack bootcamp, worn as a world. A derelict boardwalk arcade restores itself arc by arc as the course is completed, and five commission projects become playable cabinets.
A 150-hour curriculum needed a reason to finish. MARQUEE makes the course a building: the blade sign's seven letters light one by one as arcs complete, and the floor holds five arcade cabinets, one per commission project.
The Franchise Desk spins the same skeleton into a new subject and validates every proposal against the live page, exactly seven arcs, exactly twenty-seven mission slots, hours matched to the source. PYTHONZ, the first franchise, shipped as a standalone Python course rendered as a CRT terminal.
Stack
- Hand-authored single-page HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, no build step, runs from disk offline
- Canvas atmosphere layers, CSS 3D cabinet fronts
- localStorage progress with export and import
- Vendored fonts
Decisions
- Trust boundaries. A proposal file will happily agree with itself, so it is validated against the live page, never against its own claims, and previews render through created elements only.
- Two courses never share a save. Each edition owns an isolated progress store and omits the shared floor so no stage is tracked twice.
- The progress key survived three full reskins because key names are schema, not branding.
Lessons
- A generated facade came off the hero. Attached to a low-quality generated image it held the real work back; the focal object gets built in-medium, not placed.
- Same skeleton is not same projects. The first franchise draft mapped the new subject onto the flagship's own projects and was rejected; the rule was written down.