The Grumpy GameDev

Hello! I have the term "GameDev" in my name, but I do not "develop games". To be fair, these things are game-like, and game-adjacent, but they are not games.

I craft interactive experiences, and the methods by which they display as well as the controls by which you interact with them are just as much a part of the experience as what you do within the experience.

Many of these are experiences for a terminal. Some of them are graphical in nature, but LOOK like a terminal. Some of them look like the screen of a 1980s micro, I tend to pick the TRS-80 Color Computer, as that was my first computer, but there are those that look like a IBM PS/2 as well.

Why am I explaining this? Because what I do is atypical. I am keeping alive a way of making interactive experiences that is not mainstream or forward thinking. I construct my experiences with very minimal visuals and minimal controls. Occasionally, they will still have rich, emergent gameplay. A lot of times they do not.

I use a language for making most of them (VB.NET) that people are surprised to learn still exists in the modern age, though my current trend is to make it render using Blazor and WebAssembly, so that requires a thin presentation layer written in C#.

I get asked questions all of the time: "Why don't I use language X? Why don't I use engine Y?" In some cases below, I *HAVE* used them. Generally, engines are opinionated scenegraph editors, and are great for what opinionated scenegraph editors are good at making.

I make my experiences out of code and the occasional image or sound file. I make them for me, not for mass appeal. Maybe this is something you'll like, or if yer in the right demographic will make you nostalgic. Maybe it'll confuse you instead.