jcoffey-dev
5f8ad511f0
Faithful day loop - weather report, cost of lemonade rising over the summer, glasses/signs/price decisions, thunderstorms, heat waves and street crews - with the $$ LEMONSVILLE DAILY FINANCIAL REPORT $$ laid out the way it printed. The simulation is kept out of React so a season can be run headlessly: a careful player compounds $2.00 into roughly $22 over twelve days, while an all-in player goes broke about seven times in ten. Weather scenes are pixel rectangles in SVG and the music is a small chiptune engine on the Web Audio API, so there are no binary assets. The screen is locked to a 4:3 tube and never scrolls.
78 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
78 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
# Lemonade Stand
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A browser recreation of the Atari 8-bit BASIC classic — the one you typed in,
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ran on a TV, and lost two dollars to on a cloudy day.
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React + TypeScript + Vite. No art assets and no audio files: the weather is
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drawn as pixel rectangles in SVG, and the music is generated by a small
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chiptune engine built on the Web Audio API.
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## Playing
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```
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npm install
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npm run dev
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```
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One to four players share the keyboard, hot-seat style. Each morning you see
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the weather, then decide three things: how many glasses to make, how many
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15-cent signs to put up, and what to charge. Then the town votes with its
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pocket money.
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- Lemonade costs 2 cents a glass on days 1–2, 4 cents through day 7, and
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5 cents after that.
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- Everything you make is made *today*. Unsold glasses are poured away.
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- A hot, dry day brings a bigger crowd that will pay more. A heat wave is
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better still.
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- A cloudy day can turn into a thunderstorm, and a thunderstorm ruins every
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glass you made.
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- Street crews close the road now and then, and they tend to stay for a
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second day.
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- Signs work, but with sharp diminishing returns — the fourth one barely
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earns its 15 cents.
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You are broke when you cannot afford a single glass. Otherwise the summer runs
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as long as you like; **RETIRE** closes the books and shows the standings.
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## How it is put together
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```
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src/
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game/ pure simulation - no React, no DOM
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constants.ts costs, weather profiles, the demand curve
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engine.ts rolls each day and settles the takings
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reducer.ts the day/turn state machine
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rng.ts seeded mulberry32, so a run can be replayed
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audio/
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synth.ts pulse-wave voices, noise percussion, look-ahead sequencer
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tunes.ts the title, trading and closing themes
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components/ the screens, and the CRT they are drawn on
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```
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The simulation is deliberately kept out of React: `engine.ts` takes a player, a
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decision and a day and hands back a `DayResult`. That is what makes it possible
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to run a few hundred seasons in a script and check that a careful player grows
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their two dollars while a reckless one goes broke about seven times in ten.
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### The demand curve
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The original BASIC listing is not reproduced line for line. `constants.ts`
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holds a reconstruction tuned to behave the way the game plays: cheap lemonade
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sells out, sales fall to nothing once the price stops being a bargain, heat
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lifts both the crowd and the price people will tolerate, and signs help a lot
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at first and hardly at all later.
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### The television
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An Atari 800 fed a 4:3 television, and a television has no scrollbar. The tube
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is locked to 4:3 and everything inside it is sized in container units, so the
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picture stays in proportion at any size. If a page ever did come out taller
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than the tube, `Fit` scales it down rather than clipping or scrolling it.
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## Sound
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Audio starts on the first click or key press, as browsers require. Two pulse
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voices, a triangle bass and filtered white noise for percussion, driven by a
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scheduler that queues notes 200 ms ahead so the music does not stutter when
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React re-renders. `MUSIC` and `SOUND` toggle independently.
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