Games and Experiments
The following are more recent things that I have worked on. All of my projects can be found on my github, but I have not looked at a lot of them for a while so your mileage may vary.
Falling Sand
This is a little experiment I did with Rust/Bevy as a small 2-day (and some change) hackathon. It essentially lets you spawn little blocks of the following types:
- Sand: This is the meat and potatoes of the game, and essentially it will try and fall downwards when possible. It will not move directly side to side however, so it is not quite as fluid was the water block
- Water: This block is like the sand block but will move side to side as well, giving it a fluid effect. While the behavior of which direction it goes (between left and right) is supposed to be random, it will generally lean towards the left for some reason, leading to some strange effects.
- Solid: This block will not move. Ever. It does pretty well of holding the other blocks, but it has to be completely sealed. If it looks like this:
then it’s possible for other blocks to go right through it diagonally.
Anyhow, it was a fun experiment and it was cool to see unfold. I may come back to it one day if I decide I want to go crazy with these neat sorts of physics.
Avoider Game
Also done in Rust/Bevy.
The name of this game is rather misleading since I did end up extending the scope past simply avoiding the bad guys, and also included shooting of the bad guys. I know, I know, it was a very brave and innovative change of scope and you can leave your awards right there on my desk.
I was too lazy to change the name to something different to match this scope, so it shall henceforth be called the avoider game.
Jokes aside, this is effectively galaga but horizontal, less flashy, and no sound. It was a fun learning experience and it is a complete game. The final level is level 4, and once you clear out the bad guys then you win!
Shape Learning
While not quite as “accessible” as the previous two projects, this was an interesting experiment I did with Python and tensorflow. Essentially, I created a mini image generator that created shapes and used it as data for machine learning. There are instructions for setting it up in the readme. It’s not perfect, but it was definitely fun to make!