Recently, I rekindled my passion for web development. I even bought a series of lectures on Udemy teaching me all the ins and outs of full-stack web development. It's going great.

But over the holidays an old flame within me started to rekindle. I partook in the age old tradition of watching my brother play video games. He started off with Red Dead Redemption and then switched to Elden Ring. Both fantastic games. And as I watched, I remembered the exciting days when I used to fiddle around with the Unity 3D engine. That trip down memory lane led me to discovering the magic of

<canvas></canvas>

I didn't even know I knew this tag. But I researched it and found a tutorial on the MDN explaining how to make a 2D breakout game. I already got the idea in my head to build Pong so I used this tutorial to build a version of it.

It's definitely more like squash... But I had a blast building it!

I went on to make another game called Harvester where a "farmer" (white block) has to go around harvesting all their "fruit" (red block) before it disappears. It's a bit janky so I never posted it to my Codepen, but it was also fun to build.

I was on a roll though. So I built another game: Guess The Word. It's basically Hangman, but with no hanging man and a very limited array of words to guess. It's simple and beautiful. I had actually built a console based version of this game before in Python. But it was nice to finally build it with some nice UI.

And the momentum keeps going. Now I'm working on Tetris. Did you know that the shapes in Tetris are actually a very specific subset of geometric shapes generally labelled as polyominoes? Check out the Wikipedia, it's fascinating! Anyway, this one is a challenge for me. But I'm learning a lot about JavaScript and geometry. I have a basic skeleton version just focusing on some game mechanics, but no graphics.

My Tetris won't be built in a day like the others were. But it's the next step in a hopefully long and interesting journey into the world of game development.