About

During the first part of the summer of 2024, I programmed a bot that fetched wikipedia articles and posted them on X.com (Twitter). The bot has a number of criteria that have to be met for a randomly generated article to be selected. For example, the article must be available in at least a few different languages, ensuring that it is not too obscure.

I decided to embark on my game development journey late in 2019, and have since published 11 games. I began by teaching myself the basics of Unreal Engine and Blender. During quarantine, I found the time to build my first game, Ichor, a greek-themed arena shooter.

Later in 2020, I decided to switch to Unity for development, as the development cycle was much quicker and it opened the door to collaborate with more people, as Unity is a more popular game engine. I was mostly motivated to learn Unity by game jams, which are competitions under which participants have to make a game in a short amount of time - usually only from a few days to a week - under a predetermined theme.

Over the span of 2020-2023, I participated in many game jams, and developed:

• Chit Chat, A choose your own aventure interactive fiction game
• Panda in Space, A rage platformer
• Cryptologist, A code-breaking pseudo-typing game
• Idol’s Tower, A dungeon crawler with a wacky twist
• RunnerOS, A desktop-themed platformer, made in 2 days (pictured above)
• Little Dice, A cute dice puzzle game, made in 2 days (pictured below)
• Heroes’ Emporium, An item mixing puzzle game, also made in 2 days

I also worked on a few other projects, some larger and some smaller:

• Sublime Monkey Perfection, a fast paced platformer (pictured below) which placed #2 overall and #1 in the “IDEA” category in the Finally Finish Something 2022 Jam (although it was not made specifically for that jam)
• Beat Brawl, a rhythm game I made in an afternoon
• Meowchemy, a hitman-style stealth game about a cat sneaking around a castle (pictured further below)

Overall, I am fairly proud of the game library I have cultivated over the years. Feel free to check the web pages for these games on the links page of this site.

Background

During the summer of 2024 I worked at a very hardware-oriented company, Matrix Design group. Interested by what my co-workers were working on, I decided to try and complete a hardware project of my own.

The Process

Coming into the project I had little robotics / electrical engineering experience, but thanks to conversations with one of my co-workers, I was able to learn about breadboarding, relays, duty cycles, and much more. Once I got my hands on a plank of wood, a camera, a 3d printer, a raspberry pi, and some wires, servos, and relays, I got to work. I wired up everything, and gave the turret the ability to either be aimed manually or automatically through image-recognition.

Results

In the end, the turret worked well with a few small issues. Due to the (painfully) slow speed of the raspberry pi’s processor, it took a long time for the turret to recognize where people were at. Despite the shortcomings, both the manually controlled and computer vision-powered versions were a lot of fun to work with, and I feel that I learned a lot while working on the project!