Cartbox (working codename)

A polished fantasy console + cartridge marketplace built on TIC-80 (MIT). Play tiny games free in the browser; buy the desktop app to make them; sell your carts with creator revenue-share.

▶ Live static demo: https://cyohn55.github.io/cartbox/ — play the demo carts and use the full editor in your browser (work saves to localStorage). Accounts, publishing, and the community server need the full stack and are disabled in the demo; see apps/web/scripts/build-static.mjs.

Attribution: This project builds on TIC-80 by Vadim Grigoruk (nesbox) and contributors, MIT-licensed. The TIC-80 copyright and license text are retained in packages/engine/ and surfaced in the app's About screen.

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Monorepo layout

tic80-console/
├── BUILD_PLAN.md            # phased build plan (start here)
├── README.md                # this file
├── package.json             # npm workspaces root
├── landing/                 # static signup landing page (deploy first)
│   └── index.html
├── apps/
│   ├── web/                 # Next.js — marketplace, gallery, play pages, API routes
│   │   └── README.md
│   └── desktop/             # Tauri shell wrapping the TIC-80 editor
│       └── README.md
├── packages/
│   ├── engine/              # TIC-80 fork (git submodule) + WASM build scripts
│   │   └── README.md
│   ├── player/              # embeddable web cartridge player (WASM loader)
│   │   └── README.md
│   └── ui/                  # shared React components + design tokens
├── services/
│   └── payments/            # Stripe Connect helpers (payouts, entitlements)
└── infra/                   # deploy config, env templates, IaC notes

Workspaces

This repo uses npm workspaces. Each apps/* and packages/* is an independent package. TIC-80 itself is vendored as a git submodule under packages/engine/tic80 so upstream stays cleanly separable and easy to pull/patch.

Getting started (scaffold bootstrap)

# 1. Clone TIC-80 as a submodule (the engine)
git submodule add https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80 packages/engine/tic80

# 2. Install workspace deps
npm install

# 3. Build the WASM player (see packages/engine/README.md)
npm run engine:build:wasm

# 4. Run the marketplace app
npm run dev --workspace apps/web

# 5. Deploy the landing page immediately (independent of the rest)
#    Point Netlify/Vercel at ./landing  — see landing/index.html

Build order

Follow BUILD_PLAN.md: landing → web player → marketplace → payments → desktop app → jams/launch. Each phase is a shippable vertical slice.

Environment

Copy infra/.env.example to .env.local and fill: DATABASE_URL, SUPABASE_URL, SUPABASE_ANON_KEY, R2_ACCESS_KEY_ID, R2_SECRET, R2_BUCKET, STRIPE_SECRET_KEY, STRIPE_CONNECT_CLIENT_ID, STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET.