kevkev.dev
Hey, this is my website - I’m Kevin, and I am a person living in Austin Texas.
I like making weird things to share with my friends, and this is a place
for sharing those things. During the day, I work on seller tools at
Bandcamp and the rest of the time, I futz around with music
and I read some books. I make games sometimes. They don’t have goals always, so maybe some of them are Art.
I also run a bit; I’ll run my second marathon in a few weeks.
Let’s be real, I also watch a lot of Netflix.
Projects
I’ve worked on a few projects during the pandemic era: I made a Telnet-powered “falling blocks game” in rust (github) that works pretty well. I also have made a bunch of games with my pal Nik (web site). Some of them are pretty fun! Some are better than others. We played around with constructing a few games in javascript, but we’ve also played around with Godot and I have spent a bit of time with Unity.
Blocko (play) (github)
Blocko is a client-server falling blocks game. Blocko is a rust library that knows how to play a certain familiar game where you try to make lines to make the fallen blocks go away. Blocko is a Telnet daemon running at blocko.kevkev.dev.
At first I called this thing Tetrix, but it seems to me like the name is too similar to a certain registered trademark and all that. So now it's called “Blocko.”
Maybe one day, I’ll make more Blocko middlewares. Right now, you can only interact with Blocko via Telnet.
The circle (play) (ldjam)
This is one Nik and I worked on together, for Ludum Dare 47. It was a fun project! I kept trying to make the game harder by messing around with the controls, and he kept trying to make it easier and more approachable. I made the music and sound, some of the graphics (I think I figured out how to make the shaders for shiny surfaces on the loops), Nik figured out how to make the spaceship follow any 3D path (though in our release for the jam, it only follows a looping path) and he knows what a “quaternion” is 🤷♀️. We borrowed the code to generate the starfield from a dentist office’s website.
People liked this game!
Oumuamua, the interstellar traveller (play) (ldjam)
This is one of my favorite games we made together; this one was for Ludum Dare 48. We wanted to make a gravity slingshotting game, but it was too hard to play, so I suggested we draw a line that predicted the path of the spaceship. Nik thought that would be too hard, but he knows about “quaternions” and it turned out not to be too hard to implement. We also used an early version of Nik’s JS game engine, gokartjs. It’s an ECS. Once we spent a day with it, it was really easy to dream up a new feature and bolt it into the game to see how it worked. Very fun! I also made the graphics for all the little planets and made the music. Your trajectory jiggles about, based on the positions of the planets (the planets themselves have static orbits, this is just a game after all!)
I think this is probably my favorite game I’ve helped make. It’s still fun to play and kind of zone out and watch it, even now. Buckminster Fuller said that there’s no “up” or “down”, there’s only “in” or “out.” I think about that sometimes when I’m playing this one.
One of my favorite things about this game is that when you die, the game over screen lets you start over, or just accept it and let the universe continue without you.