Source note: Local copy of a Summer Into AI 2026 submission originally published on Substack. Screenshots, video, and audio found in the post body are mirrored locally when publicly accessible; profile and avatar images are intentionally not copied. Read the canonical post.
This is one of those combination ideas that made sense on the surface and then spiraled out of so much control that there’s a bowling alley in the game.
What I aimed to do was to take the CSV list that I’ve shared with the competitors of the submission tracking of substack posts, games, git repos and so on and turn that into a need interactive exhibit. What better way to feature all the different projects than an arcade? That part worked great!
The arcade itself has some basic controls:
The Arcade Gallery
There’s nearly 50 arcade cabinets in the experience. You can walk up to any one of them and “enter” to play.
For example, hitting enter on Ride Revere Ride opens up the interactive panel:
And there’s nice links from there to the code, build log or the demo itself. Every arcade cabinet works in this way.
The Gallery of Academic Posters
If you attend a conference (GTC, various academic conferences, etc) you’ll often run into the poster gallery. Think of these as infographics that summarize the research that a researcher (or team) collectively spent the last however many years of their lief working on. I like to invest time in reading such posters seriously, and thought it’d be fun to do something like that for those who submitted code with or without playable demos.
In that honor, I had a little help and built out a poster gallery.
So you can visit each poster in the poster gallery and see information about the project. It’s an innovative new way to think about your git repos.
The TV Replay
During the four week competition I recorded a lot of gameplay on the belief that maybe I’d find a user for the footage. Then I found that use. There’s a television that shows like a twitch stream of different projects from those recordings. I can’t say the build has all the videos-I let Codex take the wheel on which ones to pull over, but there is quite a bit.
Spatial Audio
Did you know threejs and webaudio support spatial audio? When Jake Strait showed you can do procedural audio that stunned me. And now I’ve sinced learned you can do spatial audio.
The jukebox is crude-it’s nowhere nearly as neat as the audio projects Kyle Sebeysten or Myles have done. However, it’s the first time I’ve seen spatial audio in a submission outside of the accidental implementation in independence town. It’d be really neat to expand this into a threejs concern-what if a music video were a threejs scripted scene?
The Bowling Alley
When 5.6 dropped and my credits kept getting reset, it was an unexpected gift. So I used that to build a bowling alley. The TV at the top builds on the idea for Week3’s space game where the in-game TV or screens reflect realtime information. The realtime information here is the bowling score.
You can bowl a quick game or enter a league.
And it even comes with sound effects! The pin collector and bowling lanes could use improvements, but hey… it’s like… a bowling alley “just for fun”.
The Secret Town
Wondering just how far I could push 5.6, I asked it to merge independence town after the bowling alley. Could the town itself be part of the game?
So instead of independence town, there’s independence city. It’s very similar to independence town-just different. There’s not as many hidden rides. The mario kart is back, and I tried to do some new tricks with the train track. But otherwise… it’s independence town.
The build system is assembled so you can try to build out for sparks. Overall, it’s a weak port. I’d want to put a few more days into it. But it’s still a good carry-on for a last minute “hey what if?”
The wall is a tidy hack. The arcade room is visible in the scene and so to stop that from being scene, I built a mountain around the playable area for independence city. That works pretty well. The lesson there is that sometimes you don’t need zoning. You just need a wall.
Where to play
Enter Arcadia-not optimized for mobile. I was busy making a music video.
https://ericrhea.com/gamelab/projects/arcadia/index.html
Original source
Canonical Substack URL: https://advisoryhour.substack.com/p/summer-into-ai-erics-week4-submission.