My Projects - A general overview

I'm a huge fan of logic puzzles, having been raised on the works of Raymond Smullyan and his bible "The Lady or the Tiger". When I took my first course in programming and found out anything I wanted to put on the screen was just another problem to solve, I knew it was what I wanted to do and has remained my passion ever since. Game design was a natural draw as I loved imagining how I would design cool mechanics I saw, or designing systems that were equally complex and elegant.

As you can probably tell, I'm a bit invested in function over form. I'm heavily inspired by megaprojects like Dwarf Fortress or SS13 that have a lot of overlapping systems and mechanics, leading to a high learning curve and a near-infinite skill ceiling with very little interest in graphics beyond whatever is necessary to understand and play. Not in a minimalist or "retro / 8-bit / ASCII art looks cool" kind of way, but more that I think effort put towards making a great game should be more impressive than making a game look great. 'Should' being the keyword, as my solo thesis project was basically my attempt at making one of my debug-ASCII pet projects palatable to normal players, learning a lot in the process.

This website is a good example: I could have gone for a cookie cutter layout preset on some site like Wix or Weebly, but thought it'd be cool to show that I could pick up a new tech skill on the fly and use it to make my own site from the ground up instead. Learned HTML to make the front end display, set up the server directly using DigitalOcean and SQL, and now I can upload any changes I want at the click of a button. It looks like a 1990's parody straight from Hypnospace Outlaw, but I genuinely like the minimalistic look and think its a good example of how I think. I sincerely hope that 's' in the 'https://' up there is impressive, that was a hassle.

My current project is Rustsplinter, based off a branch of Trick of the Light before I added its iconic vision and memory systems. I get an idea for a mechanic to add (robots need batteries to do certain actions, a numbing poison that spreads throughout the body, grabbing a weapon with multiple arms makes the attack stronger, etc) and work through making it functional with the current systems, as if it were a coding challenge or logic puzzle.