Unfinished Projects (2026)

My "most recent" project. There is one before it that is yet to be finished, but I still (maybe erroneously) believe I can finish it. I also have an upcoming project that I am just on hiatus from because I am studying abroad at the moment.

"Lightning Nightshade" is a tool to make bezier-curve based rails for a potential train game I had in mind. Since around February 2025, I have been interesed in the Densha De Go! series of games, and it came back a couple times later. When there is nothing on screen, click the mouse to start a new segment of track. Drag the small black dots connected to the lines to change the shape of the track segment. Press the blue circle to add a new segment of track to the end of the current segment. Press the green circle to select that segment of track. Press space to see what it would look like for a dot to ride along your track. You can also press shift if you want to save your map as a JSON file, but there would be no use for this.

"Luxurious Sawfish" was an attempted implimentation of this train mechanic. There is also some terrain generated from a heightmap for the train to ride along, but I could not get this to work. I figured I would be able to pretty easily get the X/Z coordinates of the train and then reference the heightmap to get the Y value, but I couldn't get the math to work. I don't think I had any specific future plan for this game, I just wanted something humble where you could drive around the train. I feared the moment in which I would have to make/add new assets for the scenery and trains and buildings and whatnot. I just wanted to prove I could make a train system. Getting those bezier curves to work was enough for me though. That took some effort.

I had thought to make a train game a couple times earlier, but I never did anything with them. I had this idea for a game where you drove in a train like in Densha De Go!, but sometimes you would cross tracks with another train and you would have to step out and kill the other driver. This is because in the future, all methods of war have been discovered, but older technologies had been forgotten. The current meta of war, at least within the United States, is the railway system. The US military now uses railways to transport things and rams the trains into each other as attacks. Getting these encounters where you would have to step out and kill the other person would be very rare, maybe occuring a maximum of 3 times during a playthrough. You really would just be calmy piloting a train around, doing as you were told. There would be one scripted collision in which you have to get out and kill the person, only to find out you have accidentally killed your significant other and it turns out you had been fighting in a secret civil war against the Native Americans. I got bored of the idea and I also figure that isn't really my story to tell.

In this game, I tried to make something like Pikmin. Pikmin's AI and design is much more complex, but I liked the idea of an RTS where you lead around a group of "soldiers" and they automatically attack enemies for you. I didn't get any farther than this, though. I did eventually want this that you play here to be a zoomed in part. You would lead your forces around on a map of provinces and have your battles held in this part of the game, sort-of like games like Nobunaga's Ambition.

This game is a rudimentary version of a game played at VFWs or social clubs in small town communities like mine. An organization sets up an event where you take your shotgun to shoot at blank wooden targets. You mark these targets where you think your shotgun will shoot at, and whoever gets the closest shot to their marking wins a prize, often some meat. The skill here is not only aiming your gun, but also understanding the spread of the bullets it makes. The organization provides you with cartridges of birdshot. In this game, I simplified it to 12 shots, one cartridge per turn. You go against 12 other enemies. The player needs to learn the typical pattern (which does exist) to get better scores. You start by pressing Z, then marking (using Z) where you expect your shots to go. Then you aim your gun and fire. Press Z to continue and repeat.

This game is a game of aesthetics, of which I am very proud. I think minimalism is a little underappreciated, you just have to put some love and care into it. I don't have too much to say about how I crafted the aesthetics, they pretty much speak for themselves. I really like this font I found. It was designed to replicate the feel of the old ReCaptchas. It is a really great font. I'm just really satisfied with the feeling of the look of this game

Originally I wanted a system where days would pass. You would meet with 1-3 people in this club you regularly attend and talk to them about their lives. They would tell you about leaving their home and returning, and about coming to accept what once you thought was terrible. These were some feelings I was mulling over at the time as I had left for college 2 months earlier, and because of recent events, I am having similar feelings again. I really had big plans for the story, but as mentioned previously, I'm not much of a writer. I had some systems planned for how the characters you would meet would change over time, but I really just ended up making a watered down diary, and figured I probably don't have the writing skill to make it not seem like I am directly talking to the player about my exact experiences.

I like that idea for the story, and I really like the looks and gameplay. I still toss this game around in my mind thinking that I might want to make it again. I don't think I ever will though. It will live its perfect life here.

The idea for this game would be that you run around and take on these enemies by getting into a short, button-pressing sequence that was almost like a QTE. I only got this far, and whenever you try to initiate a battle, the game breaks.

In this game, I tried to create something where you can stop time and then do something. I forgot what that something was, and we'll never know because I couldn't get the shaders to work right.

This isn't really much of a game, but still an interesting ui design. I don't remember exactly what I was inspired by, but I know I was really inspired by something. I wish I had ended up using it for something.

An attempt to recreate the style of gameplay of Touhou 1 in 3D. I don't think this is the first time I have tried to recreate Touhou 1, but it's the only time I have on record here. There is a good chance an earlier attempt was made in PICO-8. I never got farther than bouncing the ball around, but getting the physics and camera right took some time. I wanted to have this game take place in a warzone, but you wouldn't actually be fighting in the war, you would just be making your way through town whilst trying to avoid soldiers and other hazards. Around this time I really latched onto the idea of the story and gameplay being thematically separate but still linked. This idea also shows up in "Slots", and to a lesser extent in "Heisei Sevens".

The second iteration on my idea for a "brainrot" game. Inspired by the semi-brain-off nature to slot machines and the slime/Subway Surfers videos you'd see on TikTok or Instagram Reels or Youtube Shorts, I decided to try making two games side-by-side. Originally, I made this as a project in PICO-8 to make a semi quick-and-dirty demo, but I got decently far and I worked a decent amount on the looks. Later, I made this, trying to create more future-proofed systems and what not. I also separated the two parts of the game into 2 instances of p5.js, which was insanely hard to figure out. It paid off pretty well, though. Depending on what you roll on the slots, different things happen in game. At this state, it only adds enemies you can fight against, but in the origial demo, it would give you extra weapons. I really like this idea, but I don't think I will ever follow up on it.

Another iteration on "The Waiting Game". I didn't get farther than adding points on a map because the math was very hard. For this project, I used the Web Mercator projection, but this didn't help the math get any easier. I did add some more cities for this one though!

The best rhythm game system I have made yet. This one also keeps with the idea of maintaining a steady rhythm to help your beetle fight, but instead of having a predefined track you had to play along with, I worked with my limitations and instead made a system that just tracks your relative rhythm. This is probably the most genius idea I've ever had. It's such a robust system and eliminates the need for so much painful design! It also is beneficial to those who can read sheet music some. At the bottom of the screen, you will see 3 tiers: red rectangles, white rectangles, and blue rectangles. The red rectangles will align better with the white rectangles the better you keep your rhythm. The white rectangles are just a guide. The blue rectangles show the relative rhythm you have to play. I programmed 5 rhythms for you to play, but originally this would only be able to be changed in code as I did not intend for anyone other than me to play this. I have added a selection for ease of use and better appreciation.

This game is one of the first where I really started to reject a lofi aesthetic. The stump is low poly, and I planned to have other plants around that were just billboards, but this is because the game already ran a little slow on a school Chromebook (if you can't tell by now, that is generally my benchmark for how optimized I want a game to be). The textures, however, are much larger than other images I used in my games. I felt very innovative by creating a depth of field effect by blurring the grass texture, which was made very large to accommodate larger screen sizes. For this reason, I also removed the images of the plants I wanted to add. While originally I thought there was no reference to these plants, I had last added one as a test. I got rid of it anyways as you couldn't even see it. While the game is loading, the screen will start as black and get lighter as more assets are loaded. Please be patient.

This is a fangame for "Heisei Pistol Show", which is one of my favorite games. Part of it was supposed to be that it has nothing to do gameplay-wise with the original game, and only features the same characters. This was inspired by Touhou Soccer. I never got around to adding in the character designs (although I did start to draw them), but with what I had made, I tried to recreate Heisei Pistol Show's scrapbookish style. I went on a search trying to find the fonts used in the original logo, but even with the help of a friend, I had no luck. Instead, I found fonts that gave a similar vibe to the original ones used. I also used a western/cowboy font for the end-zones because I was still on the western high. This is the second or third time I had tried to make a game like this, and it is my best iteration.

In this game, you pass the ball around and try to make it to the other side of the field, where you can touch down the ball. If you throw the ball or lose control of it, the other team may pick it up and sprint for their end-zone. You cannot use D to throw the ball forward as that is an illegal move in rugby. Maybe I could have utilized this key better. You can then run up to them and tackle them. Then you must spam E to try to get the ball back in your possesion. When there is a tackle, players for each team come to help you, which increases your chances of getting the ball. Enemy players will also follow you around, but not tackle you. This is one of the more advanced enemy AIs I have made.

I still like this concept, but I don't think I will ever end up making it. I wanted there to also be a story mode where your opponents come in order of the fights in the original game, which would even allow for a diagetic mirror-match. After you beat what is the final boss in the original (no spoilers), you would then go on to challenge Revolver Ocelot from Metal Gear Solid. I'd say I was about halfway done with the basic engine at this point, and after that I could just fine tune things, add menus, and be done after I finished the art. I tried not to have crazy big plans for this game, as I was starting to learn in which ways that doesn't work for me.

Another game inspired by Shin Megami Tensei dungeons, this time the dungeons from Shin Megami Tensei 3. Here you move around and open doors. There's not much to it. I spent a lot of time getting the movement to look and feel right. It was all for nothing though, as the 90° FOV makes me feel sick playing it. I was inspired by the different layers of hell in Buddhism to have a tower where you explored these levels and traversed them like it was depicted on a mandala. This never got farther than a few haphazard designs in my sketchbook. It's funny, because I remember really pouring a lot into this project but not much came out as a result. That's gamedev for you.

"Boilerplate 3d" was a project I had stored in the p5.js Web Editor to easily copy and work from without having to do things like set up a scene that would automatically fit the screen you're working with.

I still really like this idea. In this game, you control a mecha-robot that must make deliveries to various points on the globe. The idea is that you fly about as fast as a commercial jet, so for these long distance flights, you would have to wait. This would allow someone in grade school to manage their robot inbetween the hours of class, and return an hour-or-so later for the game ready for you. I still liked the idea of mechs from Armored Core, but I wanted to explore the slower side of things, and I also wanted to explore the idea of less popular places on the globe. I included various cities in Africa because I had been thinking about how not many video games are set in Africa. I included Phnom Penh because I really enjoy Cambodian rock music from the '60s-'70s. I included São Paulo because I like Brazil. I included Minneapolis because I wanted to have somewhere in the United States that really wouldn't be the center of international trade. The story would take place many years in the future where most modern places are destroyed, and posts have been set up at these previously important cities.

Although the primary mode of travel is automatic, you can also manually choose the angle at which you move. I never finished this game because global coordinates are fucking hard. Trigonometry goes deeper than you'd think. No matter what I put in my code, not doing it myself, nor stealing some code, was able to get things to move right, so I gave up. I did not give up on the idea, and I have tried a couple times more to get this to work.

You can also find a much less finished version on this website here. This is because the game uses cookies to store your position in the world, and cookies do not work in the p5.js Web Editor.

This game is probably, if not most definitely, my magnum opus, both in gameplay, and aesthetic direction. It is another product of staying at my grandma's house for Thanksgiving.

Gameplay-wise I was trying to achieve a couple dreams I had for a while. First, I have wanted for a while to have a good, 3D danmaku game. I had seen some attemps like "Defined Sense of Atmosphere", and another nameless image somewhere on the internet, but nothing that got this far and in my hands. Secondly, this is another camera game. Originally, my strategy for a 3D camera game was to do a projection of the enemies in the world to see if they would be on screen, but this proved too difficult. After researching on Reddit and StackExchange for this project, I realized I could just check the relative angle between the enemies and the player and see if it is however wide enough to count as being within range. This didn't all the way turn out. This game would be setup as a boss rush where you would dodge bullets and take photos to damage the bosses and progress their phases.

The square aspect ratio, internal names for the lenses, and some of the aesthetics were inspired by my love of medium-format film photography. The camera you were supposed to be using was a Mamiya 6. The character is based on the oracle bone script character for human. Other oracle bone characters would have been used for the bosses. The pretty blue skies and white clouds were inspired by some old PSX games, but I can't remember which. The purple projectiles are inspired by CAVE shooters like DoDonPachi. The name was designed as a complete non-sequitur. I wanted the game to have no lesbians, no gun-shooting, and no deer. It was just supposed to sound good and misdirect someone who had just heard of the game. I was mad at my friends and peers who would get interested in a piece of media just because they heard there were queer characters in it, not because it was a good or interesting thing.

This game's engine is also very fleshed out. Enemies and backgrounds get dedicated scripts, bullet patterns were determined by unique functions, and there are specific classes dedicated to handling the playfield and game state. This is one of the few games I was able to build upon and adapt the engine for as its size and complexity grew. I even tried to plan for a difficulty progression, and therefore in its final state you are able to take on 2 bosses. I also had placeholders for a game over screen and a loading screen (although that more just functioned as a rest for the player).

Here is another Metal Gear Solid inspired game. It is not as fleshed out as "Pingas Gear", but it does exactly what I was looking for. You move around in a top-down view and when you move up against the corner of a wall, the camera shifts so you can look around the corner. I took a lot of time getting the camera angles exactly right for this. You can punch your enemy down and then pick it up to move it out of the way. After you let the enemy sit for a while, it would get back up. Eventually, I would have liked it to come and try and get you. By now, I had already had the chance to play MGS 1, 3, and 5, and I was really inspired by how easy it was to go without actually killing anyone in these games, and in 5, you could even take others on the field back to your base. I wanted to have MGS but it was just this. Also inspired by MGS, the WASD keys would have functioned as another set of face buttons, hence using W for punch, and not "Z" as I would have usually used for a game controlled by arrow keys I almost succeeded too. For being a game pretty much only inspired by aesthetics (I only started this project to get the looking around walls), I got far with my goals for it.

The name of this project is "Hithem", which is especially unrelated to this game. Originally, this p5.js Web Editor project was going to be a rhythm game. I had left this project/tab open, but I had completely changed what I wanted to do with it. "Hithem" because that is what it might sound like if someone speaking Brazilian Portuguese said the word "rhythm".

I also started a project for a level designer, but I did not add any code.

Following my desire to create a gambling/slot machine game. This one in particular is inspired by the Konami Metal Gear Solid pachislot machine. While using this IP to make profit for a large company in a fairly unethical manner is something to be upset at, I found the idea of having the outcome of a slot machine progress the story very interesting. The summer of 2024 I began to be interested in westerns, so I wanted to have a modernized western story play out as you succeeded. Again, this game is all aesthetics. I worked really hard making it feel right. I was never super happy with the border, but the symbols I drew for the slots I was very proud of. There are 8 symbols, half are original creations and half are lifted. Starting with the originals, the character in red is a very simple, line-drawn character I wished would be somewhat of a mascot. It was supposed to not represent anything, but I hoped that there would still be some character in it. In the yellow is a rabbit stylized in a way that makes it look like the Up&Up logo. It took some time to properly design this, and I was very proud with the result. I think also it had some other inspiration, but I cannot remeber it. In the green is the face of a frog, subconsiously inspired by Keroppi. This one also took some time to get proportions right. In the blue is the @ sign. This is another thing I wanted to be fairly abstract, but also have a personality. I had a plan to use these "characters" in some sort of comic. All of these designs I made sure to design in my sketchbook, so I still have the originals somewhere. Moving on to the borrowed items, first is a yellow 9-ball from pool. This is directly inspired by Effigy from Bonequest. Second is a heart, lifted from playing cards. Third is a cherry, a classic thing to have for slot machines. I put extra care into making it look good. Fourth is a white dragon tile from mahjong. In 2022, I got fixated on mahjong. It is very aesthetically interesting to me, especially with the idea of having a blank card (one that isn't even a wild card like you may have in Scrabble or poker). the style in which I drew it is very pleasing to me and this is because I have had plenty of experience drawing mahjong tiles. All of these tiles are supposed to give off a miscellaneous/unfitting vibe. I had also coded support for cookies to save your progress, but here it only saves the amount of credits you have.

By far my most successful boids program. I remember making this one to see if I could make a decent follow-the-player AI without having to learn A* pathfinding. It actually turned out surprisingly well. Here I returned to my roots and followed a Daniel Shiffman tutorial. Lo and behold, it payed off. If I ever make a game that needs this, I think I will just lift this code. The block in the center of the screen is actually 16 circles. This is because circles are pretty simple to calculate collisions for, and having a bunch of small circles works much easier with how the boids' code avoids things, as I could just repurpose their ability to avoid others in their own flock to avoid these smaller, blue circles.

The index.html for this project also calls for a "pings.js", but this file is not present and I do not know what this could have contained. Maybe pings was something to communicate between boids? I don't know.

I had this idea for a project which would be like a visual novel but less character-focused, or at least less focused on you following a picture of the characters and their dialogue dialogue. The story was that there was a niche community of people who were heavily invested in Pole Position 2 by Atari. This community would find as many different ways as possible to get something out of this game. The main character's plan is to hook themselves up to their computer (hence the title, translated to "A Game of Intimacy") and become one with the game, one with the speed, and be able to completely optimize the gameplay. I think the concepts of this are interesting, but I wouldn't expand on this story. I like the idea of a niche group playing a game weird like this (inspired by Eddie Krieger's story in "17776", please read it if you haven't!), and I like the aesthetics and I like that I had planned to try and give some abstract display of inner feelings eventually (I tried to use these photos and the swirling effect to give this to the viewer), but the story idea of hooking yourself to a computer and going fast I find a little passé (also, although having known about it for a while and having had it influence my aesthetic proclivities, I still have not watched Serial Experiments Lain).

This story also was inspired by another story idea I wanted to explore in 2021-2022 where a teenage girl (one around my age at the time) would have gotten a head transplant because of science and would have to deal with alienation from her body. She would have been able to have this happen due to something specially able to connect the spinal cord to her new body, one of the main challenges of head transplants. The idea of a head transplant came from the story of Robert White's work on monkeys. That story still sticks with me. I really liked that idea, but I've never really been much of a writer, and I had no clue how to really go about that, so I gave up after I was able to draw her. The idea of technology connecting with a human body stuck with me, and it came over to this. Still I would like to be able to use this format, but I just don't think it's for me.

This game was my attempt to make something like Armored Core. The bar on the left represents your energy. When it is a solild rectangle, you can use it. When it goes to just an outline, it is refilling. This was a little while after Armored Core 6 got announced or released, but I remember when those things happened and a lot of people started talking about them. This got me aesthetically inspired to make my own, especially because I didn't feel like emulating the game or buying Armored Core 6 for $70. I put a lot of effort into making all these mechanics and getting them to work. For some reason, you cannot see the enemies, but if you could, they would be static white boxes. I also seem to have broken the code to display the projectiles you shoot, but I promise you are doing something. I also had separate left and right shoulder weapons, and I set it up so they could be modular, just like Armored Core. I have since played Armored Core 4 Answer, and I definitely would prefer this more stripped-down version of customization. For the controls, I was definitely inspired by Armored Core and Metal Gear Solid's desire to use all of the buttons on a controller. Obviously, this looks a lot different with a keyboard, but there is still quite a few buttons you have to press, and they are not very contextual.

This is another Shin Megami Tensei inspired project. By this project, I had already experimented enough with Shin Megami Tensei aesthetics in the past that this felt a little like a return to form or a homecoming of sorts. In my Replit days, I had tried a couple times to make SMT-likes, and aesthetically they were all really nice, but the furthest I got was moving around and getting an encounter. One better project I had done was I had created a basic setup for a real-time FPS dungeon crawler that I wanted to take from Shin Megami Tensei, mainy in the type system/attacks. This one didn't get much farther, but I don't even know if I had a real plan for what gameplay would look like other than moving around in a dungeon. I did that pretty well. I did it good enough that for a few days before I gave up on this project, I would just move around and have fun.

Aesthetically I still think it looks pretty good. I definitely got exactly what I was looking for. Programming the ghost effect on the map tool was a pain from what I remember. Making this webpage has also made me realize that even though I think lofi and low-poly aesthetics are a little overrated, it definitely saves on space. This game totally beats "Various Sparrow" with its 2048x2048px cursor texture for a program who's resolution is only 400x400px. The name was also inspired by Kowloon's Gate or Kowloon High School Chronicles, games I don't really know a lot about, but find fascinating. Thanks, ThorHighHeels

In the backend, this project is one of the few where I stored the assets under "res". Usually, I have a folder called "assets" and within that I may have subfolders like "levels", "images", "textures", "models", "fonts", etc. This trend was started with "Believed Lobe". As I got more skilled in programming and tried out other setups, I learned that for languages like C, C++, and Java, or using systems like Raylib, LWJGL, or Godot, assets would be stored under "res" and have shorter subfolder names like "img". I did not follow this convention for long. This game also has a level loading system, so I at least had the structure to expand on.

This was when I was really inspired by Shin Megami Tensei. I wanted to recreate the battle system, but in a terminal-style way. The terminal style was inspired by Hifuu OS, of which I have only toyed around with the demo. It is such an interesting concept though and I need to get the actual game and sit down with it and truly take it in. Anyways, I never got far with this project as parsing input sucks and I don't like designing battle systems. However, I've been working on a different project recently and I got really stumped on how to do stylized text input, and it turns out I've had the answer all along. Thanks past me!

I think this was my second attempt at a golfing game, but definitely my better one from what I remember. I am really tired of trying to search for a golfing game and all that comes up is either some boring wii slop or bullshit mini golf. I was inspired by Pangya, which I heard of from Youtuber Hazel, long-time source of inspiration. I also liked seeing about Ribbit King, but that game is a little inaccessible and also a little too mini-golf-like for my will. For some time, I supplimented my golfing needs with Neko Golf for Android, but it's very much a gacha game with sexualized anime girls and I really don't want that. I wish I had the motivation to golf again. The title for this game is "golfing" but with some weird Mandarin phonetics. Around this time I was really fascinated by erhua.

While making my first golf game sometime in spring 2023, I asked my math teacher and at-the-time golf coach what it felt like to get a good hit on the ball. He told me it really doesn't feel like anything, and you really feel something when you mess up. This has really stuck with me, and I think about it more than normal. It was cool seeing the more regular people in that class think it was cool that I was making a golf game. I always like trying to do something I haven't before, and I used to really reject sports, so since around that time I've been interested in trying to make sports games in a very distinctly graph100 way.

Another fighting game. This time, inspired by the lady who uses a gun in Melty Blood. I'm not a Melty Blood fan, but I tried to get into it. Anyways, I got fascinated with the idea of guns in fighting games, so I tried to make a gun-only fighting game. Not much goes on here. The name pays homage to Soul Calibur, my favorite fighting game. Soul Calibur's name comes from excalibur, but I took that and made it caliber like bullet size. Soul Calibur is also defined by weapon use. I was also inspired by Bushido Blade and the first game to use "hit points", which led me to also consider having ever shot be a one-hit-kill.

My most developed Metal Gear Solid clones. This would've been before I played any of the games. I got pretty far into some of these mechanics. I got lost again at enemy AI. Also, for some reason, it breaks when you try to shoot. It's missing a function, but I remember this not making sense when it first happened. Unfortunate. Definitely some more fleshed out gameplay and assets. I still tried to go for a PSX aesthetic at the time. The wall texture is an edited texture from Quake. I did make all of the other models and textures too. This was another game where I did a lot of work on it at my grandma's house. It was a big project of mine, but I don't have a ton to say of it now. Definitely was a good practice for making a more mechanically-dense game. You can pick up items, set and detonate claymores, toss grenades, reload weapons, etc.

This is a pretty basic pachinko game. Its beauty is in its simplicity. I'm still pretty proud of how this turned out. I don't know if I'll ever revisit it, but I got pretty close to being done. I think for the most part, everything works perfect, all it's missing is content. I used to have a really great level for this, and it was really fun to play, but I accidentally overrode it and gave up on the game before I made a better level. I'm still really proud of it. If I went back, I might change some of the aesthetics, but it's good in my opinion. Also, the slot machine doesn't do anything, but I made another project where a slot machine does stuff, so I have some experience with that. I do stil also like how I tried to replicate an LCD screen with the slots part, even it it wasn't very successful.

As for content, I think I would just have a few boards that alternate. When I see other indie devs iterate on classic concepts like this, I see them try and add real progression, but this sorta normalizes the games and makes them feel a little samey aesthetically. This is probably one of the earlier games where I consciously would have preferred a somewhat boring, but consistant style of gameplay. I prefer that. Pachinko, in real life, is obviously gambling. In a video essay about gambling games and pachinko (this one, I'm pretty sure. Even if it isn't, it's still a good video), the creator mentions how you get into a certain specific angle, but there's no skill after that. I don't need to add roguelike mechanics to that to have fun.

The level is named "Manhã do Carnaval" after the song from Orfeu Negro.

I made this project 2 days after the last one. This is a much more polished and expanded version. Pretty much identical gameplay, but with much better movement, and now with a bomb/shield attack. Heavily inspired by Touhou if you couldn't tell. This is probably the game I've made that most tries to pretend like it's a Japanese game. Nowadays I really dislike that.

The idea for this story was that you were traveling through this farmer's-market-like festival and kill the spirits going around. This is the aformentioned "YinYang FEST." Also, it is 1 of a planned series. I had somewhat of an idea for a second game, but really only a vague aesthetic idea. This whole period of my works were driven by aesthetics.

This game is pretty much finished, it's only missing content. Ideas and mechanics are pretty well done. Also, the main character of this game was going to be the main character of another bullet hell I made about a year before this. The main sprite is directly lifted from that game.

There it is again with the title. I was really obsessed with that title and feel for a while. In this game you run around and kill stuff. If one of the cubes is red, that means you are facing it right and can attack it by pressing Z. This became the base idea for another, more finished game.

The outlines for the objects on screen are created by disabling the depth buffer, then drawing a black version of the object in question slightly larger behind everything. This was a technique I heard was used on games like Jet Set Radio (another one of my y2k obsessions) and Okami to create an outline without having to use a lot of CPU/GPU power for a shader (which, honestly is just harder to code and gives a worse result unless you give a year to figure out the math). I had experimented with this effect before and I think this is one of my best implimentations of it.

Another journey into making a fighting game. During my Replit era, I had tried to make a few, but with limited success. This time around, I had gotten familiar with a few fighting games and so I was able to have a wiser perspective as to how to properly design this. Still, like with any fighting game, it was difficut to make. This is also one of the very few games I made with some form of enemy AI. I hate coding enemy AI, so I genuinely try to avoid making games that require this, or at least try to make games that need very simple follow-the-player AI. I tried some to make the enemy do different attacks contextually, and I also tried to level the playing field by making the enemy have to input its moves into the same system the player has to.

Aesthetically, this game takes from a few places. The stick figures, although just placeholder dummies, were definitely a little inspired by YOMI Hustle. The yin-yang ball, of course, was inspired by Touhou. Its use as the main form of attacking was inspired by Lethal League, although I still haven't played this game. The idea of kicking the ball around also goes back to Touhou, this time, Touhou 1, which I have a soft spot for. The title, however, was 50% of the reason for me making this. It was heavily inspired by the various titles of Asuka 120%. At this time, I was really interested in the aesthetics of the titles of obscure Japanese games. It was very fascinating at the time, and I still kinda get a kick out of it, but I wouldn't want to title a project of mine like this. The semi-word salad feel does still inspire me some, though, but that comes from many other influences too. Asuka 120% being a fighting game designed for PC players also inspired this game's design.

Ride around on a motorcycle. Use Q and E to shift the gear. Shifting the gear was inspired by Pole Position, as you would ideally want a lower gear to help slow yourself down on corners, and this would have also been to help you slow down to attack enemies. I really love the concept I had for this game. I thought the idea of riding on horseback for war was really cool, but I wanted to modernize it, so I had the idea to have the character ride on a motorcycle. This was also inspired by that one scene from FLCL, but I still haven't gotten the chance to watch that. Anyways, you would be able to ride around and lance people off while sitting on your motorcycle. I also wanted to make the motorcycle you ride on the same style as this bulky Harley Davidson my great uncle had recently bought at the time. If I were to pick out a motorcycle for what I think a motorcycle shouldl like like for me, I probably wouldn't pick that one. However, it was so beautiful with its cherry-red color, and its bigger shape made it almost look like a futureistic vehicle, something a little otherworldly. Being in Guatemala with half of everyone on motorcycles, I've recently been thinking more about this idea, and I might try to revisit it soon, if I ever get rid of the Linux bug.

This game was inspired by something else, but I cannot remember the name at all. There was some older game where there was no real concept of up and you just moved around on this spaceship. This project was my attempt to do that. Unfortunately, I don't really understand how some of the math works so there still kinda is an up, and if you look too far up it will mess with the camera. This is a really spectacular concept, though, and I really wish I could try it again. I had a philosophy for a while where I aimed to make all of my games fun to move around in, because it was such a simple and basic thing to have in a game, but it really was able to make a fun experience out of something so barebones like this. Also, the original resolution was 320x240, I doubled the size so you didn't have to squint to see what you were doing.

Test for a block-built world inspired by Sengoku TURB. Also features a black cube bouncing around to test for collisions. I was really obsessed with that game for a while, and I still have never gotten close to playing it. The code also originally called for an image I drew a while back that I labled as a "bromide" of my character Kaligula. I thought this was a little funny because I got that idea from Sakura Wars, but I really only got into that literally a year before I made this. Anyways, it's somewhat aesthetically interesting, and going back through it gets my creative juices flowing a little.

I remember working on this during my 10th grade history class when I had time. I was really stoked that I could get something to look like this. It was exactly what I wanted.

Move around the maze and take pictures of your opponents to kill them. Your opponents also try to take pictures of you. Press space to ready your camera, use the arrow keys to line up your shot, then press space again once an enemy is in the frame. Enemies will darken in color the more you take pictures of them. You can see the last photo you took in the top-left, along with your health and cooldown below it.
This is one of my more successful camera games. Ever since I learned about the Touhou camera games, I really wanted to recreate that in 3D. One of the many games I lost was a 3d action-"platformer" where you could move around and take pictures of things and sometimes it would disappear. That game was also somewhat inspired by Kowai Shashin as you would have to press a few arrow keys to successfully take the shot. Doing this in 3D proved incredibly difficult, so for this project, I decided to scale things back and make it 2D, returning somewhat closer to the Touhou roots. This game I would have already had the chance to play and get the feel of. This game also uses a differently-edited version of the background image of the second main phase of BlackStarGarden. I really like how it looks. Maybe I will try to reiterate on this game. Beware: this game is very prone to breaking.

One of many tests to see if I could get to understand 3d projection. I think I was able to understand the concepts, but I really had a hard time putting it into practice. The end goal was to make a very basic 3D "renderer" on my Casio graphing calculator. That never happened, though.

After a few nothing-projects in the summer of 2021, I took a big break of doing things on the p5.js web editor. I think this is about the time when I switched over to replit, because I disctinctly remember making a 2.5D fighting game, a rudimentary 3D model editor that I used for a project with a moving character, and a Yume Nikki inspired game sometime in the first semester of my freshman year of highschool. I came back to p5.js for this project, a virtual pet to be on the homepage of an earier iteration of BlackStarGarden. I recall BlackStarGarden having 3 distinct phases: 2021-2022, which was very y2k inspired, very typical for neocities, bold, optimistic colors, very typical neocities personal page at the time (you can also get somewhat of an idea of the aesthetic from this project), 2022-2024, which took more inspiration from the backgrounds of touhou games, and the most modern iteration.

2-in-1 because these were to be part of the same project. Altogether, these were inspired by old survival horror games, when those started getting popular again. I really only cared about Silent Hill 2, but aesthetically this is also inspired by Alone in the Dark and Quake. The thing in "Room Demo" was inspired by the "biblically-accurate" angel fad that went on around the same time (although it lasted much less longer, and I got bored of it pretty quick myself). The titular "walker" was inspired a lot by Quake's art style. Notice also how it does not move fluidly, as were the animations in the original versions of quake. Also, all of these models were hand-programmed vertex-by-vertex as I was never super confident with Blender. This also made it a lot easier on the end user (who would most likely be using a Chromebook), as they would not have to load a .obj file and textures, but instead just color in some polygons provided by the code.

Another simple 3d first person game, but this one is a big shift in my desires with coding. I made this project when I started really getting into Id Software's Doom and Quake, and boomer shooters in general. Around this time in early 2021 was, from how I saw things, the start of the boomer shooter revival. This is about the time when I started really getting into low-poly/ps1 aesthetics (and some earlier), 3d shooters, and this general fast-paced attitude that is still somewhat popular, but I find passé at this point. Soon I'll really be finding my aesthetic voice, and I'll start to develop a style. I was really maturing as a developer here.

Look at that! I actually added a description of the controls with the game! I believe this is because I wanted to share it with friends, and I got tired of explaining the controls. This is just a basic first-person environment. I modeled these all in Blender, and later these assets would be used for a very rudimentary online game that I also never finished farther than basic movement. It was really cool at the time! Just looking at these models and this lighting, I can remember the exact feeling of being in my basement then. There was also a tree model in the files, but I did not include it in the game.

A basic life simulator. All this code really does is move around some circles on the screen. The code also includes an age for each "animal", as the class is called, but this variable is only increminted. There are also variables for reproduction rate, hunger rate, and hunger. I definitely had plans for this one. I think this was one of the first times I tried to make a boid system based on the movement code, but I failed spectacularly. This was also inspired by CaryKH's various evolution simulators, and Sebastian Lague's fox and rabbit environment simulators.

A simple program to create a template for an 8-page zine built from a single sheet of paper. The was that this program would create a basic outline with some pretty colors and a little texture, then you could print out a screenshot and draw on it to create a zine. The pandemic was an especially ripe time to get me to care about politics, and I had this punk phase and I really wanted to make zines. I never really liked that much punk music, but I liked the ideas and the aesthetic so I went with it, but I really wasn't very punk. It was fun though. Cute program.

Also, the resolution for this program is 825x637px. My guess based on what memory I have is that somehow I determined this as a fine enough DPI and fit it with the United States' 11"x8.5" letter size paper. I'm also pretty sure the size of my Chromebook screen was a limitation. Maybe I had set this up so I could draw on it and use my Chromebook screen as a reference? I vaguely remember trying to do that.

Inspired by the craze of people loving fishing minigames. Walk to the end of the pier and cast your rod. Wait for the status icon in the bottom left to change, then take back your line. Check your inventory to see if you caught a fish. Once your inventory is full, return to the barrel and place your fish there. This game is very simple, but it is the first really decent-looking of my games, thanks to a sprite pack I found online. I could have sworn it was from Kenney.nl, but if it was, he must have removed it from his website. Because I didn't know how to cut out parts of a sprite sheet in p5.js at the time, I cut out all of the parts individually, so the original file got deleted once I had to give away my 8th grade Chromebook. I also "returned to form" with my file hierarchy, as all of the assets for this game were placed in one folder. I did split up the functions of the game, but with all of the images getting in the way, this just made things a pain to navigate. I also started learning OOP here (but I think I have never really learned the true way to use OOP).

A very simple city builder. You can place roads, homes, shops, and streetlamps. Originally, the streetlamps could have had actual pointLights to go with them, but at the time, p5.js only allowed for 5 pointLights per sketch. It was partially inspired by Animal Crossing and partially inspired by ThinMatrix's city builder. This is the first game/project where I really had further plans but I ended up giving up because I either got too bored, or in this case, the project (with my coding habits at the time) got too bloated. This really just made it unfun to work on. I did have a file in the directory called "todo.txt", that read as follows:

money for city
debt
road upgrades
building costs money
taxes on houses

This game also marks a few other firsts. This is the first time I tried to get serious about the directory structure of the project, organizing a folder for Javascript files, and a folder for the objects of the game within that folder. This was also one of the first projects I made where I dared to put my code in more than one file and not just pile it all up into one big "sketch.js" file. This is also one of the first few projects where I actually tried to comment the code I was working on and not just have it be ambiguous. That still didn't help me figure out the controls very well. This game was also made during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time where I really got to flex my creative muscles and develop who I was as a person, for better or for worse. This is notable for this project because it was one of the first games I worked on at my family's sign shop, a place I would frequent during the pandemic.

This was to be my recreation of (classic) Roblox. A simple character moves around a word with a pillar while the day-night cycle changes. Here it was very simple, but eventually I made a system to load in levels from a file, collision with the structures in the world, character color customization, and even online multiplayer. This game later became known as LimitlessSpaces, a domain name my father had purchased for some project of his that he let me use for my website. I learned how to make a server with Node.js, Express, and Socket.io, and I learned how to port-forward my server and IP address, and set up DNS with GoDaddy.

A basic turn-based RPG system. First, you take your turn by selecting a menu item to do something, then your opponent does its action all in one frame, and it goes back to your turn. "Single Attack" gives you one reliable-yet-low-power attack. "Multi Attack" gives you an Undertale-style (or, at least I was inspired by Undertale) system to attack the opponent multiple times. "Power Potion" allows you to restore your Power Points, letting you attack again. "Items" brings you to another menu, allowing you to select from 3 items to use. If you beat the opponent, the screen will turn seafoam green. If you lose, the screen will turn red. You will notice the name I gave it here is a little odd. I left in the default p5.js name because it also includes "copy". This is because once I accidentally copied the project, but originally the project would have been much larger with an overworld where you could move around and encounter enemies. Unforunately, when trying to delete this accidental copy a week or so later, I deleted the original with all of the progress I had made. This was incredibly devastating for me. I cried and my whole week was ruined. This project was officially named Tikasos, and was even the first things I wanted to use Neocities for, with the original URL of this website/account being "tikasos.neocities.org". This was really sad for me, but it was part of my journey in learning how to kill my darlings.

This is a simple environment of water flowing out. I was inspired by a video which explained how the art style of Untitled Goose Game (that should really date this) worked. I was really inspired by this, so I decided to recreate it. I distincly remember creating this in my homeroom class before lunch. I felt pretty good, but I remember having issues with the size of things. It was definitely the most advanced environment I had digitally created at the time.

I can tell I had this idea where you can play a game within a computer from a game. I'm pretty sure I got the idea from a game jam post-mortem about a game where bugs crawl around a computer. If anyone knows which video this is, please message me @graph100 on Discord, I want to properly document my process here. Unfortunately, I have no other idea what this game could possibly have been. I had experimented in the past with having a rotating playing field using p5.js' createGraphics funtion, but again, I barely even remember making this. You can see here some things that were indicative of my video games' art styles in this era, namely 3D games built with the default p5.js shapes functions, flat colors, and pointLights with black backgrounds. You also can barely notice, but the cursor texture is pretty detailed. <-- Here, it is displayed at 24x24px, but the original image is 2048x2048 pixels. The base color was created in another one of these programs I made, and then I edited it with my school Chromebook's default image editor.

A game where you must place nodes to connect to a battery and distribute power. I remember feeling very inspired by something, but I cannot remember what. I though the idea of connecting different nodes to a battery was really interesting, but I had no idea how to make it fun of any sort (many such cases). You can see this is one of many projects that use the default 400x400px canvas that the default new project p5.js Web Editor gives you. This is also one of the many projects I started while staying at my grandma's house for Thanksgiving that year. This was the first time that I went to her house for Thanksgiving and I knew how to code in Javascript. After doing this so many times, Thanksgiving at Grandma's became a time where I would intentionally start a project because I knew I would get an intense burst of inspiration and I would make a really interesting project.

A very simple drawing app. When starting this page, I didn't think I'd have any projects from before 2020, but here we are. I remember feeling very proud that I made this. I had learned on Khan Academy how to make a similar style drawing program, but when you dragged the mouse it would just put a circle where the mouse is. The innovation I brought here was that I draw a line from the previous mouse position to the current mouse position. I remember feeling very proud of that. I am also remembering that I made a similar program in Processing, but upon checking, it was finished in 2020. In 2018-2019 I was very interested in being an artist, it was very central to me, so I hoped that sometime I could make an art program. I learned pretty quickly that doing that is very difficult.