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14d ago

I built a complete synthwave arcade game in React with no game engine — live demo inside

Hey, Ambika here, the maker of Neon Drift. I want to be honest about why I built this and why I'm selling the source code. I'm a developer who wanted to understand how production mobile games actually work not tutorial projects, but real shipped products with audio engines, monetization, level systems, and app store deployment. So I built one from scratch. No game engine. Pure React, HTML5 Canvas, and Web Audio API. The hardest part was the audio engine. Getting a gapless looping synthwave track with no audio files all synthesized in real time via OfflineAudioContext took longer than anything else in the project. After finishing it I realized two things: 1. This took months. Most developers don't have months. 2. Everything inside this codebase is worth more as a learning tool and starting point than as a game sitting on my hard drive. So I packaged it properly docs, license tiers, icon sets, AdMob integration, Capacitor deployment and I'm selling it to developers who want to skip the boilerplate and go straight to shipping. Play the demo here: https://glistening-nasturtium-25... I'll be here all day answering every question. Ask me anything about the architecture, the audio engine, the deployment process, anything at all.
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