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.

I recently was looking around my game room for some inspiration for a quick project. I have a custom arcade cabinet based on RetroPie running on a Raspberry Pi attached to a smart TV. It has been a lot of fun playing my video games from 30+ years ago. My project this time was to add a custom acrylic sign with an RGB backlight. I wanted the cabinet to look more like an actual arcade cabinet.

My go-to site for graphic printing is Signs.com. I have used it many times for upgrading Arkham Horror: The Card Game and for other projects around the house. I designed a sign using Adobe Illustrator and got it made out of acrylic. I cobbled together vector logos of many of my favorite systems plus the RetroPie logo and named the arcade cabinet, “The Scharcade”. See what I did there? Do you see it?

I used an RGB Led Strip with IR Remote Control as a backlight for the sign and to edge light the TV screen. The IR remote is handy to change the color of the lights. Just make sure that you expose the IR receiver on the power supply so you can change the color from the front of the cabinet.

My upgrade to the upgrade was to frost the arcade cabinet sign to make it look better. The original sign was completely transparent and you could see the lights shining through from each one of the LEDs. LEDs love diffusers. To fix this issue, I used Rust-Oleum Frosted Glass Spray Paint on the backside of the sign. I tested out the spray paint on a scrap piece of acrylic. I was really worried about ruining the custom sign. Once I was confident with the results, I went ahead and sprayed one even coat of the paint on the backside of the sign. It takes about 20-30 minutes in order for the paint to activate. I wanted in anticipation for 20 minutes and I gradually saw the clear acrylic turn frosted. I was really happy with the results. The 20 minutes felt light an eternity.