Last month I started a little project called Flowgrammer. It’s a prototype visual scripting language aimed at teaching children and adults programming concepts.
Video demonstrating how blocks and value wires work
Drag and drop scripting “blocks” and connect them together to create small procedures and methods.
It’s connected to a small 2D physics engine (using matter.js), which users can control via the scripts they build.
I made Flowgrammer entirely over the course of 12 days in April 2024 using node, typescript, riot.js and webpack.
Here’s a couple of other demos:
Counter-Strike is a fun game. Over lockdown, I got into the E-Sports side of things, and eventually I made an in-browser 2D replay viewer as a little personal project back in the summer of 2023. I remembered it recently and wanted to write a blogpost about it.
Footage of the demo viewer showing a few rounds of Into The Breach Vs Vitality on Vertigo, played at double speed. Design wise, it’s one of the ugliest websites I’ve made, but as a prototype I’m happy with it.
Preamble: What’s Counter-Strike?
Counter Strike was originally released in 1998 as a Half-Life mod. The latest version of it, Counter-Strike 2 (which, surprisingly, is the fifth CS game), was released in 2023, and it’s now the most played game on Steam. Most days, there’s a point during the day where about 1.4 million people are playing it at the same time.
If you don’t know anything about CS, the basic rules of the game are:
- There are two teams, each with 5 players: the T side and the CT side
- Each round, the T side wants to get to one of the two bombsites and plant the bomb within the time limit (about 2 minutes). Once the bomb is planted, it takes 40 seconds until the bomb explodes. T’s want the bomb to explode.
- CT side wants to stop the T’s from planting the bomb, or to diffuse the bomb once its planted
With the news that Windosill is going to be released for the Nintendo Switch I wanted to write a bit about Vectorpark and how much their work affected me artistically and educationally growing up.
Background - Early Flash
A bit of back story: back in 2004 I was 11 years old. The company my dad worked for had gone bust and laid everyone off, and he had stolen a bunch of office supplies on his last day. Me, my brother and sister were given company branded pencils for school and had fights with company branded stress balls. We had branded mouse mats and erasers and a couple of mugs.
Even at this point I had been showing signs of being a weird computer kid, so for me the best thing he stole was a CD copy of Macromedia Flash 5.
Macromedia Flash 5 (who’s future versions would become Adobe Flash in a few years) was a perfect IDE for an 11 year old. If you’ve never made anything with early versions of Flash before, the basic premise (as my 11 year old brain understood it) was this:
- You’re making a flipbook, and you can add as many pages as you want
- You can make movieclips, buttons and “graphics”, which were like special-purpose self-contained flipbooks that you could put in your “main” flipbook
- You can add scripts to on-screen objects (or frames themselves) to get something to happen (like jumping to a different frame, or moving something on screen)
And thats about it.
