schlop.ai

A Website On A CRT

My favorite part of this site isn't the games, it's how the site draws itself.

There's a hidden HTML tree in the page, an element called ui-dom, that only exists to be measured. The browser does the layout, then the same tree gets drawn onto a 2D canvas, and a WebGL pass samples that canvas and runs it through a CRT filter. So it's a document laid out by the browser, shown through a fake TV. You get accessibility structure and scanlines at the same time.

Schlop is the studio behind the rest of it. The monorepo splits into schlop-web for the site, schlop-ui for the canvas and WebGL engine, schlop-mini for microgames, libraries and archetypes, and schlop-mcp for AI tooling, with mario-schlop and wario-schlop as example orchestrators.

All of it compiles with Tish. The build emits a game registry from a manifest, runs a native build-pages binary written in .tish, then compiles the site, the engine, the microgames, the archetypes and the themes into one dist folder. Every line of JavaScript that ships is generated.