A pinball machine weighs about 300 pounds. Arcade cabinets heavy. I am always looking to maximize my bonus room space… and dream. I built a quick-and-dirty web app to lay out your game room. Add games, rotate, resize, add clearance, add customized blocks. Iterate.
What I made
It’s called Gameroom Designer. It lays out your game room to scale, right in the browser. You set your room’s real dimensions, drop in machines at their real footprints, and slide everything around until it works, before you move a single machine.
You can try it here: https://nothans.github.io/gameroom-designer/
How it works
Start by typing your room size in feet (or meters, if that’s your thing). You get a room drawn to scale with a grid.
Then you fill it. There’s a searchable catalog of real stuff at real sizes: pinball (Stern, JJP, the Atari and generic widebodies), arcade uprights and cocktails and sit-down racers, a pool table, air hockey, foosball, shuffleboard, plus couches, bar stools, storage, the works. A 27-inch-wide pinball takes up exactly as much room next to an 84-inch sofa as it would in real life. Click an item to drop it in, or drag it straight onto the floor.
From there it’s the fun part. Drag machines around. Rotate them. Grab a whole row of pinballs, line up their edges, space them out evenly. Drop a dashed “clearance” zone around the pool table so you don’t forget you need five feet to actually swing a cue. Add doors, swing arc and all, so you can see the door won’t clip the cabinet you parked next to it. Zoom out to take in the whole room, use the minimap to get around, and when it looks right, export a PNG to show your partner exactly why the couch has to move.
There are a few example layouts built in, too, if you’d rather poke at a finished room than start from an empty one.
I built it fast, with AI
I built and shipped this fast using Agentic AI.
The interesting part was never “the code got written.” That’s kind of a solved problem now if you’re one person building one thing. The interesting part was the loop. I’d use the tool, hit something that annoyed me, and fix it right then.
Dragging a rotated block sent it flying to the wrong spot, so I fixed the math. Resizing a block didn’t stick, so I fixed that. I shrank my browser window and the whole layout looked like it had wandered off, so I wrote it up as issue #1 and fixed that too. Ideas showed up and went in the same afternoon: circular clearance zones, doors and windows, even spacing, drag-straight-from-the-library. Then a deploy to GitHub Pages, a banner, a little intro video.
None of that is magic. It’s a build-use-fix loop, run tight. The machine is fast at the typing, but knowing what to build next is still the whole job.
Your machine, your data
The whole thing runs in your browser. Your layout saves to your own machine, so there’s no account to make, no server to trust, and nothing leaving your computer. It’s free, and it’s open source under MIT, so the entire thing is on GitHub if you want to poke at it or fork it: https://github.com/nothans/gameroom-designer.
Tell me what’s missing
I just posted it over in the forum to get some real feedback, because I built this for people who have way more machines than I do.
So go break it. Tell me which machine I forgot, which part feels clunky, what you’d add. That’s the fastest way this gets any good.