TLDR;
I started 13 personal projects since the start of the year, and a good 70% is just garbage.
I kinda feel like I woke up with a bad hangover.
Timeline
So, here's a timeline of my 2026 so far:
January 3rd
- I developed a game in Rust a couple of years ago
- I love Kotlin Multiplatform
- Decided to port from Rust to KMP
- Got Claude Max for 100$ a month
January 6th
- The porting is virtually completed
- All tests passing and pixel-perfect snapshot tests
- I start a playthrough
- I see a magic circle on the ground
Do you know how much of a pain in the ass drawing precise geometric shapes in pixel art is, especially when you have to take into account perspective? There must be a better way...
January 7th
- I now have a syntax for a language that allows to define magic
- I now have a compiler for that language
- The output of the compiler are magic circles in the form of an SVG
- System is flexible enough that you could use it to generate something like Naruto's hand-signs by writing an extension for the compiler
January 13th
- Decide I need to write my own magic system in order to properly test the new "magic compiler"...
- End up starting to write a book (no AI, believe it or not), which I am still working on.
January 19th
- The magic system is so cool I design a card game around it.
February 15th
- Can't print cards without actually trying out the game
- Design a KMP game, with websockets, matchmaking, a static website, cool animations, etc.
- Released on it's own website
- Play with friends
- TLDR is card game is cool, but needs work, kmp app to play online is very nice
- Park the project and wait for ideas on how to make the gameplay better
March 3rd
- Decide KMP is very good
- Develop a Pinball-like game with procedurally generated obstacles, infinite play area, multiple flappers, cool sound effects and... Rejected by Apple because the game is too similar to other games...
- Apparently, existing games own a monopoly on Pinball-like games. Jesus...
- Attempt to release on Android, but Play Store now requires 11 testers to actually use the app for a while before release
- Realise that, as a 32yo male, I don't have 11 friends
- Forget it...
March 9th
- I remembered I have designed a deck of tarot cards last year
- Yes, all by hand, I have proof!
- Have Claude implement an app for tarot reading
- Spend quite a bit of time designing a beautiful pixel art / dithering / gradient animated background
- Released on the App Store
March 21th
- Background of the tarot reading app is so beautiful, Id ecide to design a whole other app around it
- I've been trying out some AI stuff
- Trained a model to generate LoFi music
- It's useless, but beautiful
- Released on App Store without issues
April 20th
- Wonder what the limits of KMP are
- Start experimenting doing 3d rendering in pure Kotlin
- Start experimenting with ray-tracing, ray-casting and ray-marching
- I end up with a beautiful prototype for a flight simulator that's intrinsically Pixel Art, not just a filter...
- When design is intrinsic, it's always beautiful to see
- Performance are terrible, as you'd expect with ray-marching, so I tried rewriting it in GoDot, but could not replicate the exact look...
May 4th
May 13th
- Why not make a tool to setup forums like in the old days?
- Import from Discord
- Full support for bots
- Websockets, because they make everthing better!
May 15th
- Remember BBCode?
- Why doesn't markdown allow to make text red??
- So this happend
May 16th
- Often at work I have to search for stuff on the network...
- Sometimes ping is ok, sometimes i don't know the IP, sometimes I need to send a specific UDP packet, ...
- Sometimes what I'm looking for it's not even on the network, but maybe on a serial port!
- So I am making a tool to make these kinds of search easier
- App is open source (but it's garbage)
May 20th
- I developed a game in Rust a couple of years ago
- Déjà vu?
- I really don't like that the game is written in Rust, not because I don't like Rust, but because Rust solves problems I don't have
- Decided to port from Rust to Vanilla Js
- It already looks kinda playable really