Hi! I'm Peter (or at least that's what I go by on the internet). This is my site where I share fun things I've made, homebrew TTRPG content for my friends, and just things I find interesting.

The Weather! (and a bridge)

I was talking with some coworkers one day about the weather and one of them brought up Windy.com. We pretty quickly got engrossed with the site for a little and explored all the many layers they have.

I saw they had a way to embed a widget into a site, so I decided to add it here. There's a few layer options in the widgets, but the site has more display options like traffic webcams.

Which prompted my coworker to bring up 11foot8, a bridge that used to have an 11 feet and 8 inch clearance (it's now 12 ft. 4 in.) in Durham, North Carolina, U.S. that somewhat regularly sheers off the roof of trucks that think they fit under it. It's also known as the Can Opener Bridge. It even has it's own wikipedia page and subreddit.

Games

In college, I took a video game design class and each assignment was a game and then we had a final project we could do with a partner. Each assignment was about a new game mechanic or programming challenge and had some basic requirements for type of game, but other than that we could do whatever we wanted.

The class used p5.js, a javascript library to make art and animations. Our very first assignment was just getting used to the library and make an animation for a "logo." I don't think we ever used it again, but I made it fruit themed, focused around a watermelon, so I decided to make all my other assignments fruit themed when possible, except for the final project.

For the final project, we could do basically anything we wanted, so my friend and I were ambitious and wanted to make a dungeon crawler. I think it turned out pretty good given the circumastances, but it does leave something to be desired. Namely, a goal. But still, we have equipment and inventory menus, animations, enemies, damage popups, random map generation, some other stuff too.

What I find funny about it is the art. For the class, it had to run without a webserver - it was just an index.html with optional other javascript files. That meant we couldn't insert images as images since p5.js expected a url to an image to load them. So we had to get creative if we wanted good art. I wrote a small program that turned an image file into a javascript file that would create a raster initialized as a gigantic array hardcoded with the rgba values of each image, and that's what we would use to "load in" our images.

No promises the games still work 100% after an update to p5.js, but a friend played them recently and they seemed to be playable for the most part.