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	<title>game room &#8211; About Things | A Hans Scharler Blog</title>
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	<description>Life, Comedy, Games, Tech, Marketing, and Community</description>
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	<title>game room &#8211; About Things | A Hans Scharler Blog</title>
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		<title>Layout your Game Room without Moving 300-pound Machines Around</title>
		<link>https://nothans.com/layout-your-game-room-without-moving-300-pound-machines-around</link>
					<comments>https://nothans.com/layout-your-game-room-without-moving-300-pound-machines-around#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Hans Scharler]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sun, 05 Jul 2026 23:24:39 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Games]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Software]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[app]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arcade]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[game room]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pinball]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://nothans.com/?p=5462</guid>

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<p>A pinball machine weighs about 300 pounds. Arcade cabinets heavy. I am always looking to maximize my bonus room space&#8230; 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.</p>



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<iframe class="youtube-player" width="750" height="422" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fwVzahs8-V0?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen="true" style="border:0;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox"></iframe>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="what-i-made">What I made</h2>


<p>It&#8217;s called <a href="https://github.com/nothans/gameroom-designer">Gameroom Designer</a>. It lays out your game room to scale, right in the browser. You set your room&#8217;s real dimensions, drop in machines at their real footprints, and slide everything around until it works, before you move a single machine.</p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-large"><a href="https://github.com/nothans/gameroom-designer"><img data-recalc-dims="1" fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="750" height="472" data-attachment-id="5463" data-permalink="https://nothans.com/layout-your-game-room-without-moving-300-pound-machines-around/gameroom-designer-screenshot" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/nothans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/gameroom-designer-screenshot.png?fit=1271%2C800&amp;ssl=1" data-orig-size="1271,800" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-title="gameroom designer app screenshot" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/nothans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/gameroom-designer-screenshot.png?fit=750%2C472&amp;ssl=1" src="https://i0.wp.com/nothans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/gameroom-designer-screenshot.png?resize=750%2C472&#038;ssl=1" alt="screenshot  of the game room designer app" class="wp-image-5463" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/nothans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/gameroom-designer-screenshot.png?resize=1024%2C645&amp;ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/nothans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/gameroom-designer-screenshot.png?resize=300%2C189&amp;ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/nothans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/gameroom-designer-screenshot.png?resize=768%2C483&amp;ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/nothans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/gameroom-designer-screenshot.png?resize=750%2C472&amp;ssl=1 750w, https://i0.wp.com/nothans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/gameroom-designer-screenshot.png?w=1271&amp;ssl=1 1271w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" /></a><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Gameroom Designer</figcaption></figure>
</div>


<p>You can try it here:&nbsp;<a href="https://nothans.github.io/gameroom-designer/">https://nothans.github.io/gameroom-designer/</a></p>


<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="how-it-works">How it works</h2>


<p>Start by typing your room size in feet (or meters, if that&#8217;s your thing). You get a room drawn to scale with a grid.</p>



<p>Then you fill it. There&#8217;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.</p>



<p>From there it&#8217;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 &#8220;clearance&#8221; zone around the pool table so you don&#8217;t forget you need five feet to actually swing a cue. Add doors, swing arc and all, so you can see the door won&#8217;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.</p>



<p>There are a few example layouts built in, too, if you&#8217;d rather poke at a finished room than start from an empty one.</p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" width="750" height="750" data-attachment-id="5464" data-permalink="https://nothans.com/layout-your-game-room-without-moving-300-pound-machines-around/image-109" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/nothans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/image.png?fit=750%2C750&amp;ssl=1" data-orig-size="750,750" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-title="Free Gameroom Designer App" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/nothans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/image.png?fit=750%2C750&amp;ssl=1" src="https://i0.wp.com/nothans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/image.png?resize=750%2C750&#038;ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-5464" style="width:512px;height:auto" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/nothans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/image.png?w=750&amp;ssl=1 750w, https://i0.wp.com/nothans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/image.png?resize=300%2C300&amp;ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/nothans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/image.png?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w, https://i0.wp.com/nothans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/image.png?resize=530%2C530&amp;ssl=1 530w, https://i0.wp.com/nothans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/image.png?resize=500%2C500&amp;ssl=1 500w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" /></figure>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="i-built-it-fast-with-ai">I built it fast, with AI</h2>


<p>I built and shipped this fast using Agentic AI.</p>



<p>The interesting part was never &#8220;the code got written.&#8221; That&#8217;s kind of a solved problem now if you&#8217;re one person building one thing. The interesting part was the loop. I&#8217;d use the tool, hit something that annoyed me, and fix it right then.</p>



<p>Dragging a rotated block sent it flying to the wrong spot, so I fixed the math. Resizing a block didn&#8217;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.</p>



<p>None of that is magic. It&#8217;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.</p>


<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="your-machine-your-data">Your machine, your data</h2>


<p>The whole thing runs in your browser. Your layout saves to your own machine, so there&#8217;s no account to make, no server to trust, and nothing leaving your computer. It&#8217;s free, and it&#8217;s open source under MIT, so the entire thing is on GitHub if you want to poke at it or fork it:&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/nothans/gameroom-designer">https://github.com/nothans/gameroom-designer</a>.</p>


<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="tell-me-whats-missing">Tell me what&#8217;s missing</h2>


<p>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.</p>



<p>So go break it. Tell me which machine I forgot, which part feels clunky, what you&#8217;d add. That&#8217;s the fastest way this gets any good.</p>
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