DOCKET RADAR - LAW IS WAR: An Accidental Video Game
Updated: 4 days ago
I set out to build some incredible legal industry software, but somewhere along the way I accidentally shipped a little arcade game about serving documents at the exact right moment, with a boss called the Prevaricator and a career ladder that ends ceremoniously with the protagonist proclaiming "I AM THE LAW!" (Hello Stallone!) What follows is a full disclosure of this accidental video game development.
I was deep in the build of Command Centre, an innovative AI-enabled legal evidence and case management system. I won't go into details on that development process, anyone who isn't a lawyer would likely have their eyes glazing over in the back of their head. The mundane always seems unglamorous.
Like anything else, it needed an identity. So I built a brand kit: a restrained, legal-grade palette where navy carries authority and a single dot with various colors translate an indicative action state. The logo: two concentric C's, Command and Centre, anchored by that all important dot at the exact middle.
A logo of concentric C’s, considering how many core legal concepts begin with the letter C — from counsel, claims and contracts to compliance, causation and contempt — would give me a remarkably coherent concept with almost limitless creative capacity.
And that's where the inception took place. Staring at these two unassuming concentric arcs with a glowing dot in the middle, for just a moment it stopped being a brand; instead I saw a plan position indicator radar.
The rabbit hole, stage by stage
Here is the chain of causation, each link entirely reasonable on its own, the case entirely defensible:
When I began applying motion to the logo, testing various animations, I gave the arcs a rotation around the centre axis of the all powerful dot. Then, since Command Centre is an app lawyers might leave open all day, it seemed obvious that the platform needed a screensaver, which would trigger if the page was left idle for too long, a simple security and privacy measure. Nothing elegant, just the logo in the center with its rotating C's; too plain. I could lie under oath here, and make up a reason; I don't have one, my inner creative counsel just thought "It's a radar..." with matters and cases drifting as blips on its scanning sector, the radar sweep turning, ambient and calm outwards.
My mind just had to creatively wander, as it does. The screensaver with its blips on it felt agonisingly close to a simple arcade game map. Something you'd see in the 80's, totally retro. Battlezone (1980), Radar Scope (1979), Defender (1981). A game held in my mind in escrow. And there it came to me, the function: "click the blip when the sweep crosses it". The screensaver would be a tiny toy for lawyers to fiddle with between hearings, while they were no doubt still accumulating billable minutes.
An hour of effort, maybe. A frivolous and vexatious little game, but in a fun way. The style guide from that innocent early version, and I tender it as Exhibit A. It's charming in hindsight. Couldn't have been more basic, admittedly I wasn't taking it seriously, yet. Just orbs on the screen needing to be clicked with the radar sweep. A coffee icon that slows time. "Serve before they breach!" A basic little HUD. Surely, I thought, this is where the matter settles.
...Oh no, here we go again. Weeks later, as I write this blog post; the free game is deployed on CloudFlare, and of course I added docketradar.com.au to my long collection of owned web domains.
There it is then, version 1.352. Legal Luminary, Supreme Justice, Legal Omnipotence, reachable only by destroying a three-stage final boss "I AM THE LAW!" Absurd and glorious, the design of a screensaver and an animated logo had became DOCKET RADAR: roughly 8,600 lines of self-contained HTML, 243 assets, 23 Suno music tracks, fifty-odd Higgsfield Seedance 2.5 video transmissions, a WebGL post-processing pipeline, a rhythm minigame to break up the action, a swarm of enemies, and a boss who taunts you to engage in glorious battle. It consumed a couple of weeks, none of them billable, all of them discoverable:
But I regret nothing, and also everything. Res ipsa loquitur.
What is this DOCKET RADAR?
DOCKET RADAR is free to play: a challenging browser arcade defense game about being a lawyer in an alternate world where the law itself is weaponised. The tagline is LAW IS WAR, which is both a joke and, as any litigator will quietly tell you, strictly on background; a fairly accurate claim.
You sit at the centre of a radar dial, you are the core, representing your protagonist. Legal matters appear as blips around you and must be served: clicked at the exact moment the sweep beam crosses them, because in this jurisdiction, as in every other, servicing legal matters is all about timing. Miss the window and the matter escalates: from blue, then amber, then red, the whole screen tinting with it so you feel the danger in your peripheral vision before you've consciously read it. Things move quickly here, blink if you dare. A red matter that survives a fourth pass breaches the core and costs you a life. Unforgiving. The registry is closed. The docket has spoken.
That's the heartbeat of the gameplay loop. But matters are only half the problem, because while you're serving, the opposition is advancing inward, ring by ring, a never ending assault, and every one of them has a different character, each with their own agenda and impact on the gameplay:
COUNSEL— slow, heavy, inevitable, like a costs order. Ten health, moves one ring at a time. If Counsel reaches the centre, it isn't a lost life. It's game over! Opposing counsel has taken you to court, and won.
CLERKS — the rank and file. They grind inevitably forward, paid by the hour, more common, more frequent, more numerous, they are the cogs in the legal machine; and cost a life by reaching the core.
FILERS — fragile but fast, moving two rings at a time. Individually harmless. The problem is when they arrive the way filings and complaints sometimes do: in a daunting mass, all at once, at 4:59pm.
SLANDERERS — sneaky lungers that leap five rings and drain the color out of your world just by existing. Whispering, slandering, spreading lies. The truth is a complete defense, they must be delt with.
REGULATORS — the tanks. Twenty-five health, cannot be pushed back, absorbing the hits, and cannot be reasoned with. They relocate around the board at will, and if one reaches the centre it infects the core and locks out your combo capability. They don't pursue, the regulate the earth you stand on.
Every enemy is readable at a glance from its movement and color, that became a lovely visual element. As the levels and your legal career advance, and the energy becomes more and more hectic. Prima facie essential that you know which enemy you're facing, and how many, and how to coordinate your defense.
Against all of this you have powers that are funded by skill rather than patience: quantum meruit, but for violence. Your Pulse power is an act of desperation, requesting an extension; pushing the board outwards to buy just a little bit of reprieve, you have only three; but they can be recharged by big wave combos, so the panic button is paid for by the good lawyering. Coffee slows time to a crawl for 5 seconds and forgives your misses, a designed exhale in the chaos, the only substance in the game with no side effects.
The Injunction inverts the entire board to white for ten seconds and doubles your damage; interim relief in its purest form: allowing you to go on the offensive, dramatic, temporary, and devastating if you use it well. And there are four drawn spells — trace a Z, an O, a triangle, or a figure 8 across the field — each a named legal maneuver, each usable exactly once per game. Cross-Examination. Class Action. Motion to Dismiss. Summary Judgment. Finite, matter-ending instruments. Spend them like silk spends a closing address.
Then there are the Summons. Occasionally a green orb appears, click it and the entire war stops for a five-note rhythm round, the whole battlefield stayed, pending the outcome of an interlocutory music minigame. Clear all five Summons across a single run and you are crowned LORD OF LAW, gaining a spare life. But beware, while you were distracted, your enemies were gaining resolve behind the scenes.
Behind it all, a looming dread, a powerful nemesis, inevitable and ever watchful, when he arrives the entire board goes wrong, the music turns, the Prevaricator has arrived. An institutional fabricator wrapped in a shield of his own falsehoods, "360° of uncertainty". A man whose entire body of evidence was created to harm you. When he reaches the core, Docket Radar stops being a timing game entirely and becomes a rapid fire shooter: tap obsessively to fire, hold to charge shot, clear the field of his minions, strip down his fabrication shield, then land charged strikes and put his case to him directly.
The Final Reckoning arrives in the form of three hectic and dramatic boss fight stages, no adjournments, it ends when one of you is defeated. Judgment must be entered here. Preferably on him, but he wont go down easy. If you fail, your legal career comes to an end.
Eighteen ranks in all, seventy seconds each. Twenty-one minutes if you go the distance. Almost nobody goes the full distance, can you? The statute of limitations on your reflexes runs faster than you think.
WHY IT'S FUN (and a bit funny)
There's a real feeling of satisfaction serving a series of matters at the perfect instant, in detonating combos, in recovering from an attacking horde of enemies. The comms transmissions give the world life, soldiers reporting in from the docket front, the Prevaricator taunting you between levels, and the total, po-faced commitment makes it all land. The game never winks. The game is under oath. And it's relentless.
But beneath the jokes and its satire it's an honest arcade game, and a demanding one. The sweep sets the tempo and gates every action: you act on the beam, not between beats, and the beam accelerates and tightens as you move through your legal career. The game demands genuine sustained concentration, tracking a rotating window, triaging escalating matters, reading five enemy movement patterns, deciding when to spend a finite spell: and it punishes lapses fast and forgives them never.
It's equally fun and frustrating, and I plead both, in the alternative. Every run teaches you something about the engine. The ending has to be worked hard for and earned, not merely reached. Due diligence applies.
How it was built
The dev log for this project runs longer than a disclosure list, so here's the honest shape of it:
The game loop came first, the core of the gameplay. Before any art, any enemies, any lore: click a blip in time with a rotating sweep. That single process survived all the subsequent iterations, improved, refined, locked down. Created within a Claude Design chat window in it's basic form, no dedicated coding this time. Binding precedent from day one, never distinguished, never overruled. I locked in the core mechanic and the structure of a run, timed levels, escalating matters, an advancing opposition, before I decorated any of it. Everything the game later became was built around the core gameplay loop, never instead of it. GPT-6 Astra was released after I'd all but finished this Docket Radar, which was probably for the best; who knows how far I'd taken it otherwise.
Then the difficulty curve, then the experience. With the loop locked, the work became tuning. How fast matters escalate, how the opposition mix shifts across ranks, where the player should feel flooded, and where they should feel briefly, dangerously invincible. Then a UI and UX pass to get the shell to a baseline: a menu, a field manual, a readable HUD. But always on my mind, was that the gaming experience felt like it was alive, breathing, responsive and reactive to your performance. Rewarding your skill, punishing mistakes.
Then it grew organically. From that point the process was simple: play a run, notice what wanted to exist, build it, play again. No roadmap, no orders, no directions hearing. I was chasing satisfying moments, the spark ring off a masterful combo filing, the whiteout gamble of the Injunction, the full-stop drama of failing a Summons minigame feeling like an impactful loss. Features earned their place by necessity, giving the player a diverse set of tools to use to reach the end; at the right time, sparingly.
The turning point was the characters. For most of the build, the game was mechanically sound but emotionally absent: dots defending a dot from other dots. A matter of pure procedure, no merits. The moment it became something I was actually excited by was when the elements were given identities. The blips became consequential. The dots became characters: Counsel, Clerks, Filers, Slanderers, Regulators. Each with a personality expressed through behavior, video's and images. The protagonist solidified: you, the lone lawyer at the centre of the dial, climbing from Paralegal toward something constitutionally dubious. And the antagonist crystallised out of the escalation itself: the Prevaricator, the pathological liar, with a voice, and a grudge. Once the game had a villain, it had a story; once it had a story, every mechanic came to life.
The pipeline (or: my learned friends, the robots)
My development of Command Center is not commercial. Docket Radar then, was an accidental experiment, my first attempt at AI-assisted game development pipeline, end to end, rather than as a exploration of technology like my pointless Las Vegas car chase video. The brief I set myself was to see how much game one person could produce using the most basic approach and iterative process.
The HTML coding took place in a Claude Design chat with a bit of Cowork here and there. Yes, I know, I would have been better off with a dedicated AI coding process, and separated the visual layers out to another set of tasks and agents. But, this game was an accident remember. I kept it simple here.
The visual generations of videos and images ran through Higgsfield, driving Google's image model for stills and Seedance 2.5 for video. That's where the fifty-odd comms transmissions came from, soldiers reporting in from the front, the Prevaricator's taunts, story beats at level milestones, along with the career rank portraits, the twenty-four achievement icons, and the title art. The voices and a good slab of the sound design came out of ElevenLabs: the chants, the taunts, the combo callouts, the sound effects, the Prevaricator's roars: an entire voice cast that I think came together nicely. On top of that sat the reassuringly traditional layer: video editing in Adobe, some Photoshopping here and there where a generated frame needed a firm hand, and every clip crushed through the tried, proven, and frankly venerable HandBrake — the one tool in the pipeline old enough to have tenure, still compressing video like it's doing community service.
And making some absolute bangers with Suno; is always fun. With the game engine being time based, I put a bit of effort into ensuring that the songs in the playlist had moments that aligned with the on screen events. Sometimes a bass drop or a drum kick lands at just the right time, damn satisfying when it does.
The honest verdict on the experiment: it works, and it's given me some ideas. A one-person, couple-of-weeks project simply could not have had this much stuff in it two years ago. AI has changed the game. A voice cast, a video cast, a soundtrack, a story, a fun and progressive game loop. The tooling has fundamentally changed what a solo can produce, even if it is just a short rabbit hole. But I'll also enter this into the record: the pipeline was assembled the same way the game was; by accident, one tool at a time, each adopted at the moment I needed it. It was discovery in the archaeological game dev sense.
If I actually set out to make a game on purpose, with intent and premeditation: I'd have done it very differently, with an entirely different pipeline and process from day one. This project taught me where the seams are: which tools should talk to each other from the start, what should be generated versus authored, and where the human hours actually go these days in AI assisted workflows. Docket Radar was the accidental precedent.
Three war stories from the build
The 6.6-second window. The serve window — the heart of the entire game — was originally written as a fixed pixel band around the sweep. Reasonable, except the sweep only travels about 19 pixels per second, which made the actual click window wide, varied and awkward. You could serve a matter while the beam was in a different postcode depending on how far it was from the center, especially problematic across different resolutions and aspect ratios. As I refined, rewritten to be responsive; and as a time value, pixels derived from live ring speed. It became a tighter band that visibly tracks the beam, and the game snapped into focus. It also gave me a unified way to control difficulty settings fluidly; without having to alter any other gameplay components. (Note to self, add fixed difficulty options and tie it to the score card).
Dead code that looks alive. Repeatedly across the project, I'd tune a lot of secondary elements of the gameplay loop but nothing would feel considerably different, because of a hard ceiling somewhere, something missing; it felt dead, not alive. So I took to creating an AI intelligence model around the blips and the enemies on the radar, which then behaved reactively to the player and their cursor on the screen. This is what will make playing the game fun well after completion of the story mode, bringing people back to keep playing to beat their high score in Onslaught mode, rather than simply surviving the game again. There could be new game modes, and new stages, new minigames, new enemies and a new boss the defeat.
The story itself doesn't sit center stage, but instead behind the action, and never getting in the way of the game loop. It creates the atmosphere that was needed, the worldbuilding gives the game color. The audio-reactive corona outside the radar rim was added to give visual appeal and fill out the empty sides of the screen. I honestly love the game soundtrack, and I wanted it to be represented visually. And it worked out beautifully with the symphony of other visual elements in the game: tone, color, shape, fades, effects, blooms etc. At first the game screen felt empty and very much 1980. But now, it feels full, with ambience and energy that serves to inform the player what is going on, and what's going to happen next.
Docket Radar is a desktop + mouse only game, somewhat playable with a tablet and a touch pen; but absurdly inappropriate for mobile devices. So I think there might be a standalone variant of the game coming for mobile, and I suspect that the audio-reactive element may be what drives that experience and gameplay loop. I've become invested in the lore and characters, so there may be more world-building ahead.
The Video's that Made It Alive
It's just one of those things, when you get in the zone and the content starts flowing. The video's bring a massive amount of life to the game and the experience, but they had to fit perfectly with the gameplay; timing was everything. But even now with the timing considered, often the player will have to see the videos with peripheral vision or as a backdrop; the game requires constant attention for its 20-22 minutes. Look away from the radar if you dare. Pausing the gameplay for a video was out of the question in mostly every case, it was a limit I needed to put on this thing so it didn't get carried away with itself. It stands to evidence that this arcade game wasn't planned, but there's actually an absolute winner of a story and some serious worldbuilding going on in the background. I will try to restrain myself from hiding an easter egg that launches a standalone video episode of Docket Radar; consider it a free pilot. The art style really started coming into its own, cyberpunk meets legal dystopia.
Thirty videos and forty rules. The comms transmissions generated more procedural rules than any other feature. The video's bring a massive amount of life to the game and the experience, but they had to fit perfectly with the gameplay; timing was everything. But even now with the timing considered, often the player will have to see the videos with peripheral vision; the game requires constant attention for its 20-22 minutes. Look away from the radar if you dare. Pausing the gameplay for a video was out of the question. Though there are particular instances when there is an exception; you'll need to play to find out where. Maybe there's an easter egg hidden somewhere that leads to a full video experience...?
The numbers
For a basic and entirely accidental game that started as a screensaver and an animated logo, I submit the following particulars:
~8,600 lines in a single self-contained HTML file
263 assets — 23 music tracks, 47 sound effects, ~60 voice lines, 50+ video clips, 18 rank portraits, 24 achievement icons
18 career ranks at 70 seconds each
3 boss encounters, each unique and increasing in drama and difficulty
24 achievements, each with its own arcade-style icon
~40MB first load, cached after that. 374MB in total
It runs on any desktop browser. And it is desktop-only, deliberately: the game is fought with a mouse. It requires precise clicks, drawn spell gestures, a charged core. None of that survives the move to a mobile screen. Rather than ship a bad port, mobile visitors get a landing page. Sorry!
Development updates: 15/9/2026
The following is a list of progressive updated to the game to get it to a point that is feels entirely resolved:
Easy, Medium, Hard settings added with dedicated selection screen
Onslaught (Non-Story challenge mode) added, accessed after game completion
Background videos added to story mode level progression to create atmosphere
General bug fixes and gameplay balancing
Court is adjourned
So that's DOCKET RADAR: a logo that became a radar that became a screensaver that inside a rabbit hole became a browser game, in what I can only describe as a textbook chain of proximate causation. It's free, it's live, and it isn't meant to be anything more than a short, sharp, fun and genuinely challenging experience. Equally entertaining and frustrating, in the way good arcade games have always been, and I'll rely on that submission. It demands your full concentration to survive a round, and real study to reach the end. The Prevaricator is waiting, and he thinks you'll settle early. Prove him wrong.
Can you become the God of Law and survive the Docket Radar?
Experience it at docketradar.com.au. It's free to play. No retainer. No Fee, perhaps No Win.
I hope you enjoy.
As for me: The couple of weeks are spent, judgment is entered, and the sweep turns without me now. I will update the game from time to time, smooth out some minor bugs. I'm looking forward to getting some feedback about the experience. Yes I should have leaned into GPT-Astra, what better excuse to figure out what magic that can do. At the rate things are evolving in the AI world, short little side quests such as these are a great way to explore AI for yourself, unlocking capability to apply it to more serious endeavours.
LAW IS WAR - DOCKET RADAR Jesse Hayes - 2026
