Hobby Projects

On this page I’ve collected together some of the more interesting digital things that, over the years, I’ve made or collaborated on for fun in my spare time.

WordStacker Daily Puzzle

A brower-based daily word game to promote my friend’s card game WordStacker by Ingenium Games.

Tiberian Dawn Editor Reference

A childhood favourite PC game, the original Command & Conquer title, got a remaster release in 2020 along with its source code and a very quirky campaign editor. I created this documentation for the editor and its many oddities, mostly for my own reference, after studying the game code.

JSONPyth

A pure-Python implementation of JSONPath, the data path expression language which is essentially XPath for JSON.

Trop Tumps

Trop Tumps is a Python script for randomly generating (hilariously boring) printable decks of Top-Trumps-like cards from categories of things in DBPedia: a queryable semantic database of information from Wikipedia.

Super Sam World

Super Sam World was a simple platform game I made for the May 2015 Manchester Girl Geeks BarCamp.

PHPCalFeed

PHPCalFeed is a script I made to make it easy for website maintainers to add an iCalendar feed to their events page.

Hear! Hear! Sneaking Hat Get

Hat Get is a wacky local multiplayer game I threw together for a game jam event. Players try to steal their opponents’ hats while protecting their own.

Mancify SMS

Mancify SMS was our team’s entry for the 2013 Hack Manchester event - a hackathon in which we had 25 hours to make the weirdest thing possible with the Clockwork SMS API. We created an SSH server allowing shell commands to be sent via SMS and, just in case that could be considered useful, we had it translate the results into phonetically-written Mancunian dialect.

MUD Pi

I created MUD Pi for a code jam hosted by Ben Nuttal. It was intended to be a teaching project for those learning to code in Python on the Raspberry Pi. It’s a very simple and easily extensible text-based game which can be played using Telnet.

Ascidia

Ascidia is a command-line tool for rendering technical diagrams from ascii art, similar to a tool called Ditaa. Ascidia takes inspiration from the Markdown philosophy of “no clutter” with regards to its syntax.

RageML

RageML is a markup language for describing rage comics - an internet meme. I made a ridiculous XSL file for transforming an XML description of a comic into an SVG image of it.

HRBrT

HRBrT stands for Human-Readable Branching Text. It is a language spec and simple interpreter that I created whilst playing around with the weird idea of branching email messages.

Screenshot Saturday RSS

I made a web scraper that pulled in images tweeted with the #ScreenshotSaturday hashtag, and aggregated them into an RSS feed to supplement screenshotsaturday.com. It’s no longer maintained.

Alone

Alone was a text adventure I started for the Ludum Dare 48 hour competition years ago. I eventually finished it several months after the competition.

Tomb Explorer

Tomb Explorer was another game I started for Ludum Dare and didn’t finish until many months afterwards. It’s a simple game in which the player must navigate a maze and find all of the treasures. The maze is procedurally generated each time the game is run and I’m quite proud of the semi-interesting room layouts it comes up with. The music was created by my friend, the multi-talented Robert Shaw.