The Grumpy GameDev

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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 may not be games according to the broad meaning. "MetaphorDev" would just confuse people, and "Artist" is too pretentious.

I craft interactive experiences(Metaphors), 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 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.

Heads up: as of October 2026 I vibe code them. For years I typed every line myself, mostly in VB.NET, often live on stream. That way of working is no longer viable for me, and I got tired of leaving things unfinished. Now I decide what the metaphor is, what the rules are, and what is deliberately unfair. I playtest every build and say "no, the cat can't do that," and Claude writes the code. Robokitteh and Roomba Rights of SPLORR!! were each made in about a day. Every page that used AI says so.

The toolchain changed too. New work is written in Odin and compiled to WebAssembly, so it runs in your browser with nothing to download. As I go back through the catalogue, most older games will be rebuilt the same way, and the web version replaces the old one. The metaphor stays the same. Only the machinery underneath is new.

I know this is unpopular. Plenty of my fellow streamers and a lot of the artist-adjacent crowd here would rather I didn't, and most jams forbid it, so I'll only enter the ones that allow it. I get it. A lot of folks have their identity wrapped up in the typing. But insisting on hand-coding is like insisting on a manual transmission while the world heads for self-driving cars. Your cheese has moved, and you can sulk about it or go find it. I did this for me, not to please anyone, and it's why my unfinished games are getting finished.

The older games on this page are the hand-coded era. Some of them are still here, and they're all still mine. As each one gets rebuilt, the old version goes away and the new one takes its place.

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. And that's what most folks think of as "games," and I don't make "games".

I still make my experiences out of code and the occasional image or sound file. I just don't type the code anymore. 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.

Thanks for engaging with my metaphors.