Projects#

This is a compilation (and blast to the past) of all the different side projects I’ve invested some serious time into outside of my normal job. They didn’t all end up with the results I imagined when starting but that should be an expected part of the learning process and I’m still very proud of what I’ve created!

BreezyTerm#

April 2024 - Aug 2024

I created a terminal emulator focused on user experience and great autocomplete born out of my own frustration with how complicated and hard to use the terminal can be. I learned Electron for the project and used the Svelte 5 beta to build it. I wrote a postmortem about why the project suddenly stopped and you can check out more screenshots and GIFs on the BreezyTerm site

Roch Dog#

Dec 2023 - July 2024

Looking to branch out and dip my toes into entrepreneurship I joined as part time CTO for Roch Dog which is a dog friendly hotel certification process. After the intial process of getting up to speed with what had been done by a previous co-founder I rewrote the site from scratch in one month with a new mobile first responsive design, internationalization support including support for translated urls, and SEO optimized with 94+ lighthouse scores. This was my first foray into the Svelte ecosystem where I was learning SvelteKit and Tailwind CSS along the way which overall was a great experience.

Macrocosm#

June 2018 - June 2022

This was the first project I felt really proud to finally ship after grinding away on it for 4 years. It started as as “simpler” game to make (no multiplayer) than my previous project but scope creeped its way into being a monster project. Check out my longest post yet “What it Takes to Make a Game by Yourself” to get a glimpse into the whole process. In short though, Macrocosm is a 2d mobile game that leads the player through 7 interconnected stages starting at the beginning of the universe all the way to managing colonies on a galactic scale, partially inspired by Spore of course. I hired some help for some of the art, music, and sound effects but did everything else myself. Everything else turned out to be quite a lot…

Along the way I also created a Unity Save Game Editor I used to modify the save games to test different conditions in the game rapidly which turned out to be a big productivity boost.

And finally after a couple years post launch I decided to open source what I can from the project to get some more milage from all the time I put into the project.

Solaria Tactics#

Sep 2015 - Apr 2018

Solaria Tactics (originally named Centauri Tac) was my first try at making a “real” game. I was inspired by Hearthstone which I was playing a lot of at the time and wanted to combine it with Final Fantasy Tactics. I got off to a good start and created a custom domain specific language to specify cards’ gameplay actions and events for the backend node server to process and send updates to over a web socket to the Unity client. The gameplay and card design were coming along and I had implemented 3d Maps with destructible objects, advanced pathfinding, many unit and spell abilities (melee, ranged, flying, cleave, piercing, taunt, cloak), deck building UIs, and I had it all working in multiplayer. Ultimately though I got overwhelmed with how much there was left to do to make a successful game that needed a critical mass of people playing in multiplayer to make it work and realized I wouldn’t be able to finish.

Game Jams#

2014

https://v3.globalgamejam.org/2014/games/relativity

It was a blast to create games in 48 hours following a theme with 4 other people across two different game jam’s. One ended up being a maze puzzle game exploring the theme “We see things not as they are but as we are” and the other was a platformer puzzler exploring selective camera motion. Both were written entirely in Javascript using the HTML5 Canvas and Sound API.

Space Tactics Game#

Summer 2008-2010

Way back when in college I started making a tactical turn based game with a friend. We were both new to programming at the time but still somehow ended up making a playable game starting from scratch and creating a custom game engine in C++ using OpenGL and Lua scripting. This was my first exposure to writing path finding systems (never did work quite right with the oblong shaped ships), audio managers, basic networking, and UIs.