Alderhoard Dev Log

Dev Log

How a throwaway game.html turned into a valley full of arcade cabinets.

Play Alderhoard free

Alderhoard is a free browser game. You walk a hand-built valley and find arcade cabinets inside it, all played with four arrow keys and a space bar. It borrows from the games Gen X grew up on: Breakout, Pac-Man, Asteroids, Robotron, Boulder Dash, Sokoban, and the Zork and Infocom text adventures on a Commodore 64 screen. This is the log of how it got built. Newest first. Dates before July 13 are pieced together from memory.

September 13, 2026A dungeon, a volcano, and a page for every level
  • 3D Waka's dungeon gets its last lair: a mimic hiding among the treasure chests.
  • Stonebreaker grows to 49 walls, adding GROWING BRICKS, THE VOLCANO and EARTHQUAKE CITY.
  • Contraption gets a new rating for a strong flight: Pretty Dang Good!
  • Every level gets its own link, on one page.
August 31, 2026Grishnak becomes Alderhoard
  • The game takes its third name and its own domain, alderhoard.com.
  • Old links keep working.
  • Soon after, every cabinet gets a shareable URL.
August 5, 2026Stonebreaker, the moon, and machines
  • STONEBREAKER, a Breakout-style cabinet, opens in the town square.
  • One rule for every wall: one new idea, nameable in five words.
  • MOONWALK and a Pac-Man maze wrapped around a sphere arrive on the same day.
  • CONTRAPTION, a puzzle cabinet of mirrors and ramps, follows on August 19.
July 15, 2026The cabinets fill up
  • Fireball Maze, a Pac-Man-style game, becomes the first real cabinet.
  • The game is renamed Grishnak. A Sokoban crate puzzle turns up.
  • Asteroids, Robotron and Boulder Dash-style cabinets follow within two weeks.
  • Text adventures, Infocom-style, including a generator that writes new ones.
July 13, 2026A valley, and an arcade inside it
  • Two games in one day: a side-view platformer and a top-down valley.
  • The valley wins: twelve screens, things to build, a warlord.
  • A thirteenth screen holds an arcade of five cabinets, earned in the valley.
  • A Zork-style keeper and a Commodore 64 teaser move in that night.
June 16, 2026game.html
  • One file, game.html, built with no plan and low expectations.
  • Four arrow keys and a space bar, from the first line.
  • The seed is a game I wrote in the 1980s.

Reconstructed: this entry was written later, from memory.