Behind the Build: How Space Ink-Vaders Came to Life
- Sophie Boulderstone
- Oct 4
- 3 min read
After winning Best Stand at the Sussex Business Show, the question on everyone’s lips was: where did the arcade game come from? So here’s the story of how Space Ink-Vaders was born.
From blanket box to arcade table
The top and glass came from a coffee table purchased at a charity shop a few weeks before the show. My original plan was to build the rest from MDF we had lying around - but I hate MDF. As the deadline crept closer, I was running through my options when I realised the old blanket box we had sitting at home was the perfect size.
So, I took the lid off, cleaned it down, added some legs I’d salvaged from a coffee table, and gave the whole thing a lick of paint. The section for the controls had to be hand-sawn, so it wasn’t perfect, but once it was painted and the buttons and joystick were added, it looked more than good enough.
Enter Simon
That’s when it was over to Simon. The whole idea - and the name Space Ink-Vaders (get it?) - was his from the outset.as much as I love words, I am no pun-master - and you do not want to get Simon started on cheese puns, there are hundreds). We wired everything up, added a sound-activated LED strip for extra retro flair, and suddenly Space Ink-Vaders came to life.
Simons tech corner.
We built the game itself as a modern web app running on a Raspberry Pi 5. The controls come from a Pimoroni Picade X HAT USB-C paired with their Arcade Parts Kit - that board makes the joystick and buttons appear to the Pi just like a USB keyboard, so coding for them was simple. The game engine is written in TypeScript using Phaser 3, bundled with Vite and run full-screen in Chromium’s kiosk mode on the Pi.
I did most of the coding with the help of Claude Code running inside Cursor, which made building game logic and fixing bugs much faster. The alien and level art was created with Nano Banana, based on a design brief we generated using Claude Code after we’d mapped out the levels.
Scores and player details (name + email) are stored locally so it works offline at an event, then synced back to our servers when there’s a connection; the live leaderboard you saw on the stand is just a web page pulling from the same API. Sound effects and music are handled in the browser and pumped out through the monitor’s headphone jack to a trusty Minirig speaker hidden inside the cabinet. The entire build took about two days in total — roughly 80 % AI-generated code, with the remaining 20 % spent refining design and animation details.
Local flavour and inside jokes
What I loved most were the features and easter eggs Simon programmed in. The i360 rises up in the second round, the targets include seagulls and traffic wardens, and by round three you’re firing at our “competition” - Planoly, Later, Hootsuite and Blaze.
There’s even a cameo from Sonny Cutting, organiser of the Sussex Business Show, who drops special weapons to aid your quest. Those little touches made it not just an arcade game, but a true Brighton-flavoured Inkie original.
Play the Game
We had so much fun with the game at the show that we couldn’t keep it to ourselves. Space Ink-Vaders is now live and ready so everyone can have a go. The only question now is… who’s going to beat the high score?
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