Paper Kid Games

How it's built

The site is Astro 5 with Tailwind 4, built to static pages and hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Pages Functions store Player Builder requests in a D1 database behind a Turnstile check, save the follow-up call time and turn short plan links back into the full plan. The games are copies of the ziggy.games originals made by a Python sync script that applies a list of small, named patches: the play-as module, the starting level, title cards that fit phone screens and the analytics tag. The source games are never edited, so a fresh copy picks up every improvement made on the arcade. The paper kids on the site's pages are drawn live on a canvas in the games' style. A build gate checks every page for broken links, missing alt text, canonicals and copy rules before anything goes live.

Built with

• Astro 5
• Tailwind CSS 4
• Canvas 2D
• Cloudflare Pages
• Pages Functions
• Cloudflare D1
• Cloudflare Turnstile
• Python
• Playwright
• GA4

The hard parts

1. A plan link short enough to type

   A printed plan needed an address a parent could type from paper. Every answer is packed into a few characters against fixed lists of skins, hair, styles, shoes, sports and levels, so a link like /p/name/code rebuilds the whole plan, and the QR code on the printout points at the same link.

2. A kid's name inside someone else's game

   The play-as module puts a visitor's name and look into games that were never built for it. Every value in the link is checked against a fixed list or pattern, and the name keeps only letters, numbers, spaces and a few marks, because some game banners are HTML.

3. One page on paper, every time

   The printed plan holds the player card, the package, the next step and the QR code on a single sheet for every combination of answers, including the longest team plans. We checked it by printing sample plans to PDF and counting the pages.

4. Copies that stay current

   The games keep improving on ziggy.games. Rather than fork them, the sync script copies each game and reapplies its patches, so updating the site's copies is one command and nothing drifts.