Play

Play Robot Battle

What it is

A turn-based robot combat game played in the browser. Name your robot, buy weapons and gear from a shop, then fight increasingly tough enemies to earn money and XP. Built by Kyle, Oliver, and Lucas.

Ported from the Python CLI game at apps/games/robotext-battle/ to TypeScript at apps/games/robot-battle/.

Tech stack

• Vite + TypeScript (vanilla, no framework)
• Vitest for unit tests
• Playwright for E2E tests
• Hosted as a static page on the blog

Development

cd apps/games/robot-battle
npm install
npm run dev          # dev server on :5173
npx vitest run       # unit tests (61 tests)
npx playwright test  # E2E tests (28 tests)

Deploy to blog

Staging (ArgoCD)

Automatic — the blog's initContainer builds the game from source on every deploy. Merging to main triggers a rebuild within 5 minutes.

Production (GCS)

cd ~/gh/multi/apps/games/robot-battle && bin/deploy-to-blog.sh
cd ~/gh/multi/apps/blog && bin/build-blog-files.sh && bin/prod-deploy.sh

Use absolute paths — cd chaining breaks relative paths between sub-projects.

Cache busting

Vite content-hashes JS/CSS filenames, so those are always cache-busted. However, index.html itself is not hashed. GCS defaults to Cache-Control: public, max-age=3600 (1 hour), and Cloudflare edge caches respect that.

After deploying, the old index.html may be served for up to an hour. To force immediate update:

# Force re-upload with no-cache header
gsutil -h "Cache-Control:no-cache,no-store,must-revalidate" \
  cp apps/blog/blog/out/games/robot-battle/index.html \
  gs://kyle.pericak.com/games/robot-battle/index.html

To verify the new version is on GCS (bypassing edge cache):

curl -s "https://kyle.pericak.com/games/robot-battle/index.html?v=bust" | head -8

The ?v=bust query string bypasses edge cache. Users can also hard-refresh (Cmd+Shift+R) once the edge cache expires.

Architecture

The engine is pure TypeScript functions operating on plain objects (no classes). All game state is JSON-serializable. The UI layer (src/ui/) wraps the engine with a browser terminal interface.

src/engine/   — pure logic (battle, shop, AI, data loading)
src/ui/       — DomTerminal + screen modules (game, menu, battle, shop, inspect)
src/data/     — JSON game data (config, items, enemies)
spec/         — game design and engine specs
tests/unit/   — vitest unit tests
tests/e2e/    — playwright E2E tests

Game data

Items, enemies, and config live in src/data/*.json. To add a new weapon, gear, consumable, or enemy, edit the corresponding JSON file. The game reloads data on startup.

Extending

• New enemy: add to src/data/enemies.json, reference existing items
• New item: add to src/data/items.json under weapons/gear/consumables
• New screen: add src/ui/screens/yourscreen.ts, wire into menu.ts