The Shelf

Board Foxes

3D hub-world game
Unity 6 · C#
2026 – present

• In development

Seven skateboarding foxes. One coastal resort island. Every attraction is a video game.

A skating hub world wrapped around eight complete games: a two-minute score-attack sky park, a four-course kart grand prix with items and boost pads, a percent-knockback platform fighter, a six-creature sky archipelago with a gym at the end, a 2D side-scroller with coins and checkpoints, a 24-tile board game, a three-trial marble climb, and — in the back country — a full creature RPG with a 24-species dex, a ten-type chart, wild encounters, four ranger gyms, traversal-gated routes, an Elite Four, a Warden at the summit, and a post-game.

Underneath it runs a living resort: a twelve-minute day/night cycle with neon signage after dark, weather that makes the collectibles glow, staff work shifts, scheduled events on a calendar, three animal villages, animated wave water, a twelve-fish angling minigame, and a house with a yard you furnish from a catalogue in build mode. The skating itself carries a full trick vocabulary — six named flip tricks, manuals for combo upkeep, per-fox signature moves and exclusive board tricks.

All thirty-four resort staff hold real conversations through an LLM, with authored persona fallbacks so the game stays fully playable with zero network and no API key. Every scene regenerates deterministically from code — a single editor command, or a headless batch-mode invocation — so a script change never means rebuilding a level by hand.

• Unity 6
• C#
• Procedural scene generation
• Systems design
• LLM NPCs
• Save systems

Blunderbuss

Correspondence chess, on a clock
JavaScript · Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects
2026

• Live

Chess with a friend over text, on a per-move clock. Miss the clock and a random legal move is played for you.

It exists because correspondence chess has two failure modes: the opponent who takes three days to reply, and the opponent who takes three days because they are feeding the position to an engine. A short per-move clock fixes both at once, and a random move is a real consequence that still leaves a game worth finishing.

The scheduling is the design. Each player's clock starts when they open the game, not when the opponent moved — so nobody is punished for delivery, an unread text costs nothing, and the worst case for a single move is two clocks rather than infinity. When time does run out, a Durable Object alarm fires server-side and plays for you whether or not anybody has the page open.

The random move is deterministic — seeded from the position and ply and nothing else, no wall clock, no Math.random — which is what lets any client replay the move list and arrive at the same board the server has. A game's entire state is a move list plus a handful of timestamps, so there is no second source of truth to drift. No accounts either: a token in local storage is the whole identity model, and holding only the link makes you a spectator.

• JavaScript
• Cloudflare Workers
• Durable Objects
• Custom chess engine
• Test suites

Ramen Tio

Mobile persuasion game
React Native · Expo · TypeScript
2026

A mobile game with exactly one objective: convince Ramen Tio to give you his ramen.

He will not make it easy — he is contractually incapable of making it easy. Tio is a wildly dramatic telenovela-energy ramen-cart owner, and the game enforces in code that he cannot surrender the bowl before your tenth attempt no matter how good your pitch is. If the language model tries to fold early, the app overrules it and makes him panic-snatch the bowl back.

Replies arrive as structured JSON — what he says, a private inner monologue, his mood, and how much your attempt weakened his resolve — and the mood drives an animated SVG character through nine states from smug to defeated. Steam always rises. He shakes when offended, jitters when panicking, and confetti falls when you finally win. Insulting the ramen makes his resolve go up.

Two brains, one Tio. The offline brain ships in the app and plays the entire game with zero network calls: it scores every plea, detects grandma stories and broth flattery and regional ramen knowledge, punishes laziness and repetition, rewards showmanship, and remixes authored bits without repeating itself. The optional Claude brain plays with full improv — and if the network drops mid-game, the app falls back silently and the player never notices.

• React Native
• Expo
• TypeScript
• Structured LLM output
• SVG animation
• Offline-first

The Groundskeeper

Novel · Audiobook · Animated short · Game
Manuscript · JavaScript engine · macOS app
2026

The groundskeeper is dead. The garden knows who did it.

The Chronicles of the Groundskeeper is a novel — first of a series — about Josh Plowen, eighteen and newly orphaned twice over, reasonably sure the official story of his great-uncle's death is wrong. A ladder. His own shears. A night job for a duke of a country no map has heard of. The letter waiting on Josh's pillow carries a mushroom insignia and it leads down: to a hidden order older than Geneva, a diary that opens one page at a time, and a slow green war being waged, politely, beneath the streets. It is a book about the people who keep things alive and are mistaken for simple because of it.

Around the manuscript sits a full production pipeline, all of it built here: a print-ready KDP interior and cover wrap in illustrated and unillustrated editions; a narrated audiobook in US and UK voices with an original score; an animated short of the prologue; and a continuity system — a maintained canon file, an editor's log, a voice study, and per-chapter advisory passes — that keeps a long serial honest.

And a game. The Escape Rooms is a point-and-click adventure built on a custom engine: painted UI, ink-bloom transitions, inventory, deterministic choices with checkpoint resets, and cutscenes. Sixteen rooms are fully designed and machine-proven completable — a solver walks every room and a linter checks every reference, flag and item on each data change. Ships as a macOS app and as a plain web build.

• Long-form fiction
• Custom game engine
• JavaScript
• macOS packaging
• Audio production
• Animation
• Print production

Family Rosary

iOS & Android app
Flutter · Dart · Firebase
2025 – 2026

Pray the Rosary in the actual voices of your family — including those who have passed away.

Family members record individual prayers and mystery announcements rather than whole rosaries, and the app stitches those clips into a complete Rosary for whichever mystery set you choose. One assembled Rosary can mix voices — each relative voicing one mystery — and because every playback slot pins a specific recording, the name and photo on screen change as the speaker changes. The voice, and the face, is the point.

All four mystery sets are first-class objects with their named mysteries and traditional fruits, and a per-family configuration decides which optional prayers are included, so playback matches how that family actually prays. Security is scoped to family-group membership at the rules layer, with server-validated invite codes issued through Cloud Functions — an access model that matters more than usual when the content is a recording of someone's grandmother.

• Flutter
• Dart
• Firebase Auth
• Firestore
• Cloud Functions
• Audio pipeline

Jesse Tree

iOS app
Swift · SwiftUI
2025

The Advent Jesse Tree, as a native iOS app.

A day-by-day Advent devotional built around the traditional Jesse Tree ornaments — each day's symbol, its scripture, and its place in the lineage — as a native SwiftUI application with a document-based model. Built to be used by a family in the same room rather than by one person on a phone.

• Swift
• SwiftUI
• Document architecture
• Xcode