Some Hobby Projects

My career started quite early. Even as a child in the ’90s, I liked playing around with HyperCard, which I used to draw, design and script simple interactive projects. This grew into an affinity for Flash and making websites as a teenager.

After my scripting skills got upgraded to programming skills as a Computer Science student, I kept putting together all sorts of different hobby projects.

In this article, I’ll share a small selection of interesting old hobby projects. These range from medium-sized to small, and are from both my teenage years as well as my early ’20s.

Mech Threat (~2004)

In the early 2000’s, Flash games were all the rage. I made several attempts to create a Flash RPG, even though I didn’t really have the skills (or the time) to make one. The most interesting of these was code-named “Mech Threat”, a fantasy-world RPG with a technology twist.

It was partially made, then abandoned. In retrospect, though, it was pretty impressive for a Flash & ActionScript 2 creation made by a 14-15 year old.

I’ve played it through recently for nostalgia reasons, and I was surprised to find that it contained quite a bit more content (story length, enemy variety, gameplay elements) than I remembered.

Here’s a quick run-down of some technical details:

• Code-based saving system: I couldn’t figure out how to save game data through cookies, so saving and loading consisted of copying and pasting pieces of encoded text
• Seamless area loading: one big game world, split into pieces that would load and unload depending on player proximity
• Timing-based combat: your typical time-based-turn-based combat as seen in many JRPGs. Early on, though, the player unlocks an evasion move that allows sidestepping damage at the cost of a recovery time (which depended on how long the sidestep was held). This changed the somewhat tedious combat into one where the player has to time their moves to avoid getting hurt whilst still going on the attack.

Ghost Pong (Sun SPOT) (2011)

An interesting little group project made at the University of Amsterdam with several fellow students, “Ghost Pong” was a game played on small devices called Sun SPOTs. Armed with a variety of sensors, two buttons, a row of lights and a Wi-Fi module, the Sun SPOT was an interesting device to work with.

“Ghost Pong” was a pong-like game for two people. The row of lights indicates the position of the “ball”. The lights are faded when the ball is far away, and more intense when the ball is close. The player has to move sideways with the two buttons to position themselves in “front” of the ball, then swing the Sun SPOT when the ball is close to bounce it back. The details of the swing are then used to determine the new angle of the ball, and it’s the other player’s turn to get into position and swing.

Bouncing a virtual ball back and forth was quite fun, and so was making a game using a device that was really just meant for sensor networks.

HuntCopter (2006)

I started off making a Flash clone of StuntCopter, which I used to play on the old Mac. It grew into a different game: “HuntCopter”.

The player controls the helicopter and, like in StuntCopter, the goal is to get your guy to jump out of the helicopter and into the cart pulled by the horse. Higher scores for longer drops.

As the helicopter continues to drop people from its infinitely sized passenger’s compartment into the bottomless cart, enemies show up to stop the helicopter. First with bows and arrows, then with guns and rifles, rocket launchers, turrets, robots, lasers and more. Unfortunately, the game does take a bit to ramp up to an enjoyable level.

I remember once making a Nintendo Wii edition. It sounds fancy, but it was essentially just a webpage with a build of the game that targeted the version of Flash still supported by the Wii with a few added pointer controls.

The game is still available to play on Newgrounds, where it has been gathering critical but occasionally mildly encouraging reviews since its release.

BlockDance (2012)

A funny little project that grew out of a student assignment, BlockDance was a music visualizer written in Java. It was originally written as a Processing project, but I later ported it to Android.

BlockDance features little characters made out of blocks, and makes them dance to your music of choice. Different limbs respond to different frequencies in the song, giving the impression of dancing. It was fun to make. Unfortunately, I never quite released it anywhere, and the source code has gotten lost over the years.

Finally

This is a small selection of past hobby projects. Many of them are unfinished or unrefined, but they remind me of the enthusiasm I’ve had for development since I was young. For that reason alone, I like sharing them.