Dark Matter Simulator
When a new astronomy professor arrived at Foothill College, he approached us at the computer science club. He spoke ominously of an impending doomsday known as the "End of Adobe Flash", and thus the end of his favorite astronomy simulations, and was in search of those who could help him rebuild. He also had an idea for a new simulation, which led to the creation of the Dark Matter Simulator.
The Dark Matter Simulator is an educational web browser simulation for college astronomy classes used to learn about dark matter, and how it affects the velocity of stars in a galaxy! The simulation features real data from published observations to show how stars in galaxies are moving more quickly than expected, and how dark matter can be used to explain why.
Tilegame Client and Server
2D chatroom where everybody is a cat! Chat bubbles appear over your head and you can walk around a small tile-based map. Find out more from the Overview:
Balloon Jump Game
I wanted to make a simple and somewhat novel game that would be described as "fun" by people other than myself.
I began to look at arcade and mobile games for inspiration, and they are generally simpler, but can still be described as fun. The mechanics were inspired by Doodle Jump, and the balloon theme was inspired by an xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/1106/
In order to determine if the game was actually fun for other people, I needed lots of other people to play it. So I choose to make it as a mobile-friendly browser game, and sent the link to everybody I knew, or handed my phone directly to my friends and asked them try it.
I would try my hardest not to give them any instruction or hints, so that I could learn what their experience would be like if I were not there at all. This was incredibly valuable, and helped give me direction about what to work on next to improve the game.
Eventually, it reached a point where multiple people described it as "pretty fun!" and my goal was reached.