When playing a game like Stars! or Asteria it's easy to feel like fleet navigation rules are simple. Submit your orders where ships should go, click a button to generate the next turn, and ships end up closer to where they want to go. Simple.
Not really. Consider these three …
I made a new service for myself called Riverbed. It crawls 120 of my favorites sources of news, reading, and entertainment then uses my own ratings to recommend the best to me. I visit this most mornings now and I absolutely love it! You can visit it here though you'll …
I decided to take two months off in August and September of 2026. Now that my time off is coming to a close I thought it would be nice to jot down all the nice ways I got to spend my time. The highlights:
This is the most impressive thing I've ever gotten AI to do.
Context: The ChessCraft app is written in C# for a game making tool called Unity. However Unity is bloated, closed source, and overkill for a graphically simple 2D chess project like ChessCraft. There's another game making tool called …
I'm making a new game.
There's a game from 1995 called Stars! that I grew up with and still love. It's a sci-fi turn-based strategy game where you "explore, expand, exploit, exterminate" a universe filled with "stars" (planets) and other empires.
From Wikipedia:
While it received generally positive …
Today I want to tell yall about a new Android app I've been prototyping this summer called Turtle Shelf. You take a photo of books and it tells you which books you'd most like. This solves real (first world?) problems in my life:
Days after first watching Obsession (2025 film) it's still on my mind. Then driving to (and from) Ottawa and listening to dark wave witch house music I felt an unusual need to get creative like I was 20 again. So I took some notes and later wrote this horror …
Greetings, stranger. I'm not surprised to see your kind here. Many adventurers have traveled this way since the recent troubles began.
No doubt you've heard about the tragedy that befell the town of Northwood. Some say that Surtr, the Lord of Fire, walks the world again.
Since at least 2005 …
This post is a chronological tour of all the types of art assets in ChessCraft (images, sounds, music, voice) and how they were made.
A ton of different methods were used. There's 200+ chess pieces made by me in GIMP, the adventure map was hand drawn on paper then scanned …
I'm the creator of ChessCraft and a senior computer scientist and educator for cloud and AI.
Any opinions written here are my own as a private citizen and not my employer.
I'm open to IT leadership job opportunities. I'm also available as a consultant or to provide training.
