I work on a variety of personal projects in my spare time. I’m always looking for new things to learn and new projects to work on.
Bearacade
Developed a Slack game to commemorate a friend’s move from Alaska to Wisconsin. The game is written in TypeScript and
utilizes an HTML canvas for rendering. The object of the game is to collect as many bears as possible without hitting
the barrels. The game is over when the player hits a barrel or runs out of gas. When the game is over, the player’s
score is posted publicly in the Slack channel.
Bearacade Highlights ⚡️
- Developed a Slack app that allows users to play a game from within Slack.
- Server written in NextJS and TypeScript.
- Uses WebSocket communication to publicly shame people who quit early.
Bearacade for Arduboy
I also wrote a version of Bearacade that runs on an Arduboy, a small handheld game console. This presented unique challenges because of the monocrome display and limited memory. The Arduboy version of the game is written in C.
See Bearacade and Bearacade for Arduboy on Github.
Bearacade for Arduboy Highlights ⚡️
- High performance graphics on heavily constrained 8-bit hardware.
- Had to overcome challenges of only having two colors and very limited memory and storage.
Nade it, Aaron!
Developed a Slack game in honor of an old coworker. The game is a real-time multiplayer bomberman clone where the object is to collect as many power-ups as possible and then use them to destroy your opponents. The game is written in TypeScript and utilizes a custom WebGL renderer.
As an exercise, I also wrote the 3d game engine completely from scratch, including skeletal bone animation in a shader and grid-based collision detection. The game utilizes the entity-component pattern.
See Nade it, Aaron! and the WebGL Game Engine on GitHub.
Nade it, Aaron! Highlights ⚡️
- Wrote a custom 3D game engine using TypeScript and WebGL.
- Wrote a custom GLTF file importer to load animated 3D models out of blender and use in the game.
- Used real-time websocket communication for synchronizing game state across all clients.
- Wrote a NextJS server in TypeScript to host the game and handle websocket communication.
Slack Basic
This project started as a Commodore 64 BASIC interpreter that I wrote in TypeScript. The goal of the project was to come as close to the original BASIC interpreter as possible, while also adding some new features. The interpreter is run from as a Slack app, allowing users to author and run BASIC programs from within Slack. Users can also share their programs publicly in Slack and allow other users to run them.
Additionally, there I wrote a companion IDE in TypeScript and React that allows users to run their programs from within the browser. The IDE provides syntax checking, code formatting, and real-time help.
See Slack Basic on GitHub.
Slack Basic Highlights ⚡️
- Wrote a BASIC tokenizer, interpreter, and runtime in TypeScript, integrated into a Slack app.
- Wrote a custom IDE in TypeScript and React that allows users to write and run BASIC programs from within the browser.
- Wrote a custom syntax highlighted code editor Raect component that provides syntax highlighting and autoformatting with no external dependencies.
- Automatically calculating line numbers in GOTO and GOSUB statements so when the code changes, previously referenced lined numbers are automatically updated.