Hello, I'm Scott! I'm a digital dilettante and this is a collage of projects I've worked on. If you'd like to work on something together, drop me a note.
Career
For a long time, roughly 2006-2022, I was a professional software developer, with some time in there as an ABD Ph.D. student. I worked in a variety of areas, including gaming, crypto, pharma operations, and search.
Games
Inspired by some streaming buddies who play chat-interactive games, I created Hangman for Twitch, a version of the children's game for streamers to play with their chat. This game was made over three days, and was tested at the end of each day on my stream. It's pretty simple, but I'm happy with it and hope to do more chat-interactive work in the future. Play it on Itch.io!
As part of 2022 7D FPS jam, I made Hookshot, a mobility-focused arena FPS, which is a fancy way of saying deathmatch with grappling hooks. I'm really pleased with how it turned out, and I hope to continue iterating on it. Hookshot is my first 3D game using Godot. Play it on Itch.io!
While learning the Godot engine, I made a game called Backwords. It is a take on Wordle, where you start with a solution word and try to create valid guesses given kinds of letter-use constraints that might come up in a Wordle run. Rather than minimize the number of guesses, you're trying to maximize the score of each word using Scrabble-style scoring. This change leads to a much wider variety of scores and outcomes, which was one of my design goals. You can play it here!
From 2012 to 2022, I worked off-and-on on a web-based game engine and editor. The engine used a novel programming language developed in tandem, featured custom graphics and sound editors, and integrated rollback-based multiplayer that required very little effort to take advantage of. Essentially, every game was also a multiplayer game. Initially called 1dash1, I eventually rebranded the project to miniboss.gg. Either way, the site no longer exists but the experience building it was invaluable and, to this day, it is the project I am most proud of.
I've also been learning pico-8. Here are some projects so far:
- A ray-tracing renderer adopted from this book, with dithering and other tweaks to work within pico-8's limitations.
- Cave, a flappy bird clone from this dev zine.
- A lunar lander clone from this dev zine.
Research
At Ph.D. school, I worked on two research projects: one exploring programming languages and developer tools for folks who are not professional developers but have a need for computation, and another that looked at adding human feedback to system optimization decisions. Both projects relied on data gathered via user research studies, which was somewhat unusual in the field - at least the systems-focused work, although you'd be surprised how few novel programming tools measured their efficacy with human feedback.
Photography
I shoot a decent number of photos, but don't share a ton. Recently, I've been exploring independent wrestling photography with a variety of cameras, including an old digital point and shoot, a modern full frame mirrorless, and a gameboy camera. All photos are licenced CC BY-SA.
AAPW event at Precision Camera 10/22/2023
Shot on a Sony Alpha 6600 mirrorless with an 18-135 lens.
Effy's Big Gay Brunch 7 9/2/2023
Shot on a ~2006 Canon Powershot SD850 IS
GCW 9/1/2023
Shot on a ~2006 Canon Powershot SD850 IS
Uncanny Attractions 8/19/2023
Shot on a ~2006 Canon Powershot SD850 IS