Projects

Latchworks: The Keyholders

Latchworks is an alternate reality game about the Society of Keyholders, who keep what others lose. It is told through nine puzzle books (The Keyholders, standalone Field Dispatches that chain into a hidden meta, and small Pocket Primers) whose ciphers hand off to each other until the last one opens the door, every lock generated and proven solvable before a page is printed.

latch.works is the other half: a society desk with fragments hidden under a magnifier, a board of a dozen Signals left in the world (a personals ad, a lost letter, a spectrogram of static, a page only the robots are meant to find), a keyhole that takes every word you recover, and a portal that tracks your rank from Applicant to Archivist.

Rad Mountain

Hold to dive into the hills, let go to pop, and lean into the trick for as long as you hold it: kickflips, shove-its, 1080s, tailwhips and barspins, each called the way riders say it, switch and fakie included. Land it square or tumble, grind the rails and ledges, and stay ahead of the avalanche, or on the city streets the sweeper, that is chasing you down. Big Air, the Mega Rail and a vert halfpipe on the lodge balcony are events of their own.

The summit is a ski town to hang out in: cruise round it on your ride, drink cocoa by the fire in a Swiss chalet, take a hot air balloon out over the drop, chase three new challenges every day, and switch on a follow filmer to ride ahead of you with a fisheye. It plays in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Chonk Wars

Two teams, two castles, one crowned hamster each. Grab theirs and haul it home; feed yours snacks until it is too heavy to carry off. Siege mode swaps the heist for catapults and a cake vault, and bots fill every empty seat so a match starts in ten seconds.

Between matches the park is the game: catapults that fling you across it, gliders and a bungee off a cloud island, triple jumps and a spin dash, fifty pets hiding in trees, ponds, reefs and a maze, and a Golden Chonk that wakes up now and then and rains coins.

Cosmic Funplex

A theme park floating in space, built on Roblox. Every visitor carries a PlexPad, a handheld computer running cosmOS: an in-world operating system with files, processes, SSH and a firewall. Every ride is a node on the park network.

There is a programming language (cosmicLua), programmable robots, hacking puzzles, STEM labs, capsule racing on the ceiling, and a missing manager named Dale. It is still being built.

Puzzlexity

Alphametics, word wheels and a growing set of puzzle types, every one generated live by a constraint solver and proven to have exactly one answer before it reaches you.

The same engine feeds a book factory: print and digital collections, typeset from the generator, so the books are as unique as the site.

Stippled.ink

Five WebGL ink experiences built on a custom ink engine: blots bloom where you touch, bleed along the paper grain and slowly fade, and what you do in one carries into the others.

Less a game than a place to sit with for a while.

littlest.one

Enter a due date and it shows where you are, week by week, in glowing painted art that ripples like it is breathing. Leave the date blank and it plays the whole journey, from the first spark of cells to the last weeks before you meet.

It is a screensaver with a heart: sixty-odd facts and small poems rotate under the art, the chrome fades away when you stop moving, and nothing leaves the browser. Built to be left running on a screen in the house, and to be sent to someone who is expecting.

The Playfair Society

Open a room and your guests join from their phones. No app, no accounts. The evidence arrives course by course, you argue it out across the table, and you name the killer.

Fair-play means the golden-age rules: every clue needed to solve the case is on the table before the reveal, and a solver proves it. The Host's Dossier is a printable case kit with the membership code that unlocks a full case for your table.

Incredibeat

A browser music toy that kept growing features until it started looking like a DAW. Paused, not abandoned: it comes back out whenever there is a new idea for the sequencer.

Prodo Pro

ProdoPro is built with the goal of personal growth. How is your precious time being spent? Cards move along a work pipeline, work happens in timed spikes, and every spike lands on a daily, weekly and monthly picture of where the hours went.

Rooms for chat with checklists and replies, a whiteboard you can draw on right through the conversation, friendly competition, and streamlined processes that obviate the need for traditional standups. Small and lean and always improving, with companion apps for Apple Watch, iOS and Android.

Capture Mate

Capture Mate lets you record any region of your Mac and export it as a GIF, MP4, or raw frames. Change your recording and export framerate at any time, remove unwanted frames and export selections of frames.

GIFs are universally supported, so you can attach an example of a bug to a ticket, demonstrate functionality to a client, or bring some life to an email.

No longer on the App Store since I stopped maintaining it, but the site stays up for posterity.

appsbynick

appsbynick hosts a collection of iPhone and iPad games released in my own time. Whenever I am in the mood to make a quick little game, I invariably end up working on an iOS game. I have more 90%-finished iOS games than I know what to do with.

It is way, way more fun to prototype games than it is to polish and release them. The apps have since left the App Store; the site is kept for posterity.

Neon Explosion

Neon Explosion is a fun little HTML5 drawing canvas and full-screen art gallery, created to let my four-year-old safely collect and share her digital art. Rainbow tools, slinkys and fading colour-cycle pens are one tap away.

The current form was built in four days, and during those four days I fell in love with the concept.

Oh, Kanban!

Oh, Kanban! is an easy-to-use HTML5 kanban cardwall created for the 2010 48-hour Rails Rumble. We started really late, so it never got every feature I wanted, but it still runs.

Keyboard Concert

Keyboard Concert was an HTML5 keyboard that let you play music for any number of observers, who watched the performance live and rated it. Recordings could be replayed and rated later.

The idea hit me, so I went to work and wrote the app over the course of a day: Rails 3 with HTML5 websockets. The Heroku app it lived on is long gone, but the screenshot survives.

Retro Arcade

Ten small browser games written between 2006 and 2008 on Prototype.js, before jQuery took over the world. They run today exactly as they did then, and every one shows its source.