Game Designs

Games Built
from Second Principles

Browser games, student projects, and father-son builds. Every one designed with Artificial Intelligence — the new way to build is to sharpen your semantic knowledge so you can describe and design exactly what you want.

6+
Games & Tools
2
Student Projects Shipped
10+
Years Building
3
Games with My Son

Playable Now

Live Gaming

Browser games and hosted tools. Click through and play — no install, no account.

Location · GPS · Oxford, OH

Urban Games

A set of location-based walking games played out on real sidewalks and streets around Oxford and Miami University — Explore Miami CEC, Geo Game, Skippers, 6 Degrees, plus the GPS path builder. Open the collection for links and how to play.

Browser · Hockey · Desktop

Drop of the Dot Dot

A fast-paced hockey card game. Desktop-optimized version — keyboard-driven, full-screen play. Designed for the browser, no plugin needed.

Browser · Hockey · Mobile

Drop of the Dot Dot Mobile

A fast-paced hockey card game, rebuilt for touch. Controls and layout rethought for portrait mobile browsers.

Conference · GameJam · 2026

Meaningful Play 2026 — DarkWeb GameJam

A hosted resource hub for teams entering the DarkWeb GameJam through Meaningful Play 2026. Requirements, constraints, and submission info in one place. Not a game itself — a launchpad for people making one.

Research · Board Games · Education

Let’s Play

A faculty learning community using board games to put educators back in a student’s seat. Founded with Eric Rapos and Miami University’s Center for Teaching Excellence, Let’s Play runs workshops and researches how tabletop gaming builds empathy for the beginner experience. Published at ASEE 2023 and FIE 2024.

Built by My Students

Student Games

Games my students designed, built, and shipped to a live server. These aren’t class exercises — they’re production deployments with full documentation.

Student Project · Browser

Pan’s Trial

A two-player tactical card-and-labyrinth game built for ECE 348. Players draft high-value cards, reveal Omens that assign each suit a changing role, move through a 6×6 wraparound labyrinth, fight with weapon cards, and enter Appeasing Pan to reshape the board or health state.

Student Project · Browser

Thronebound

A two-player fantasy card game inspired by the attack-and-defense structure of Durak. Supports local two-player play, AI opponents, responsive desktop UI, a browser rewrite, generated card art, and simulation-based balance analysis. Publishable as a class-project prototype because it is playable, measurable, and structured well enough for future contributors to extend without reverse engineering one large script.

Peter & Jack

Father & Son Projects

Three games Peter and Jack built together. They started as experiments and became real things. All are web-runnable — click Play and go.

Deduction · Browser

Sherlock Game

A Sherlock Holmes deduction game built as a web game. The original SugarScape cellular automaton is modified so Sherlock can move through the world, observe its emergent behaviour, and use what he sees to solve the case.

Simulation · Browser

Factory Game

Buy, make, and sell your way through the Industrial Revolution — turning raw resources into profit and reinvesting it into bigger, more complex factories.

Combat · Browser

Ship Fighting Game

A naval tower defense game where you build your fleet, ship goods across the water, and fight off everything trying to stop you. Manage your ammo carefully — you won’t make it across without enough firepower.

In Development

What’s Being Built

Active development.

In Progress · Browser · Prediction RPG

PJAB’s Fanbidextrous Dungeon Crawler

A live game where you make sports predictions to drive a dungeon crawl: call what happens next in real sporting events and use those calls to push your adventurer deeper through the dungeon, racing to come out with the most treasure and gold.

In development — playable now, but rough and changing.

Who I Am

About

I’m an associate professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Miami University. My research covers genetic algorithms, agent-based simulation, FPGAs, and games — that last one is why this page exists.

I build from second principles for the same reason I teach that way: the interesting problems only show up when you can’t skip them. No engines, no frameworks. You write the physics, you write the loop, and somewhere in that process you actually learn something.

The student projects here were held to the same standard — Pan’s Trial and Thronebound are production games because I don’t accept prototypes as finished work. The father-and-son games are different. Those exist because my son and I kept saying “just one more feature.”

Visit My Full Site

Questions

Because the interesting problems live in the implementation. Frameworks solve problems for you before you understand them. I want my students — and my son — to encounter the actual problem first. Then they know what the framework is doing when they eventually reach for one.

The same philosophy applies. I give students the same constraints I give myself: build it yourself, document every decision, ship it to a real server. Pan’s Trial and Thronebound are production games because the students were held to production standards.

Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS for web. Python for desktop and simulation. No build steps unless the problem demands one. The goal is to understand what the computer is actually doing — abstraction layers hide that understanding until you need it most.

Iron Grip is now playable in beta — the card game runs in the browser on desktop and mobile, and is still being refined. After that, the father-and-son games. The factory game is closest to something showable. No promises on timelines; these are built when the time is right.