Table Shuffleboard - origin story
I wasn't building a simulator
Sometime in 2012 I borrowed a book from my boss about how to program video game physics in ActionScript. The book inspired me to try to create a mobile game built using Flash and deploy it to Google Play, Amazon App Store and Apple App Store.
The original concept was to turn table shuffleboard into mini golf. The game was titled “ShuffleGolf”. I base all of the physics on concepts and examples from the book. I rented a shuffleboard table one night at a Dave and Busters and proceeded to use a Cannon Rebel camera to take vast amounts of photographs. Using Photoshop, I cleaned the images up into what was needed to create photo realistic boards and pucks.
The game I released was just ShuffleGolf’s “the putting green”. Authentic table shuffleboard was only supposed to be where you warmed up and got used to the mechanics.
Programming a game in 2012 was time consuming
Everything was slower. Google searches, which were frequent, were very frustrating because Flash documentation mainly existed for ActionScript 2, and I was programming in a very strict ActionScript 3 style. Transfering images from a digital camera wasn’t as perfect as today. Everything was slower.
In 2014 I decided to just release ShuffleGolf as a table shuffleboard simulator. The name no longer made sense, but I decided to keep it. I had already made the title screen assets, and I had/have every intention of releasing a full version of the game.
I slapped some Google Ads banners into it, deployed it to all 3 stores and was ready to be hit in the face with that Flappy Bird money. I said I was ready to make some money… Hello! Anyone?
Life was pretty intense back then with raising young kids and all. I succeeded in releasing a mobile video game to all 3 major app stores and it was a pretty awesome simulator. I was happy with the experience, but I was not able to remain focused on maintaining the app.
Somewhere around 2017 ShuffleGolf disappeared from the last app store. $57 in advertising was generated, but it takes $100 to get paid by Google. I figured, oh well. Then one day about 5 years later I found out it was sitting in unclaimed Ohio funds.
If AI is good at updating a Unity game…
I was now sucked into paying for a monthly Claude subscription, so why not get ShuffleGolf back onto the stores? I fired up Claude Code and got to work.
The way and speed in which Claude Code consumed the ActionScript files and assets was amazing. To be clear, the game was not magically converted from Flash to Unity. No, instead in a single moment it consumed the code, and in the next Claude had a 12 phase plan for making the conversion.
