Neon Snake
Eat the food, grow the trail, and avoid the walls. A grid-based Snake game.
Mechanic: Grid movement, collision detection, and a growing trail.
First edit: Change MOVE_INTERVAL_MS or GRID to adjust speed or board size.
Free JavaScript arcade game templates
These arcade starters demonstrate four different movement systems in plain JavaScript. Snake updates grid cells on a timed interval. Breakout updates a ball and paddle continuously. Orbit Dodge combines continuous steering with a timed obstacle spawner.
Each ZIP contains a standalone index.html, a README, and the MIT license. You can open the HTML file locally, inspect the inline CSS and JavaScript, and change a setting without installing packages. The files include the game visuals; no separate art pack is required.
Sky Hop adds a one-button flight game: tap the board, press Space, or use the up arrow to apply an upward impulse. Gravity and scrolling gates turn that simple input into a rhythm challenge. The source exposes the gap size, gravity, and hop impulse as separate settings.
Cosmic Breakout
Clear 28 bricks with a paddle and ball. Move the paddle to control each bounce.
Mechanic: Velocity, paddle control, and rectangle collisions.
First edit: Change the brick rows, paddle width, or bounce velocity to tune the challenge.
Orbit Dodge
Steer around falling asteroids. The longer you survive, the faster they fall.
Mechanic: Frame timing, spawning, and bounding-box collisions.
First edit: Tune obstacle speed and spawn interval separately; they affect reaction time and board density differently.
Sky Hop
Hop through the gaps, keep your rhythm, and see how many gates you can pass.
Mechanic: Gravity, impulse input, scrolling gates, and circle-box collision.
First edit: Change GAP, GRAVITY, and HOP one at a time. Keep the gap comfortably larger than the bird diameter, then test repeated hops and ceiling contact.
Choose the mechanic you want to learn
Use Snake to study a growing array and cell collision. Use Breakout to study velocity, bounds, and contact response. Use Orbit Dodge to study object spawning and cleanup. The continuous games use elapsed time; copying a fixed pixels-per-frame movement rule into them would make speed depend on frame rate. Keep the shared start/pause lifecycle when adding features.
Questions
Can these templates be used commercially?
The included original code and visuals use the MIT license. Keep the copyright and permission notice with copies or substantial portions of the code; separately added assets need their own permissions.
Which template is simplest for grid movement?
Neon Snake represents positions as cells and advances at a fixed move interval. It is the most direct of these four for learning grid-based movement.
Continue with a related collection or guide, or browse all templates.