Joel Schuman

My current game project in the making - a roguelike deck-building game with a twist on the card dynamic, set in a cartoonish forest with lots of spells, magic runes, and giant mushrooms. I'm using it to level up my Unity skills, and as an excuse to do more drawing. It's coming along slowly but surely! Go Here to play a test build and provide feedback! See brief

A strategy game that I made for family and friends one winter. You are a wizard with a bag of magical runes, which you combine to cast spells and defeat enemies. I heavily borrowed ideas from Slay the Spire, and used cheap image assets to speed up development. This was essentially a prototype for Spelly Forest (see above). See brief

I had the honor of working with some incredibly creative people (including John Dieterich, who plays with one of my all-time favorite bands, Deerhoof) to create this endlessly shifting remix of music, text, and images. You can alter different effects, sequencing, and parameters, but it's meant to be somewhat opaque and unpredictable. This was part of the "Parallels" series produced by Vancouver New Music. See brief

A client at my job needed a configurable, large-scale presentation that they could put up on a wall of 30 TV screens. I created a mini-framework for orchestrating long sequences of animations in React. For the version on this site, I replaced all the text to be about an imaginary company - Unexpected Space Filler! See brief

A clear-the-blocks style puzzle game based around matching and synchronizing rhythms. As the puzzle levels progress, the background chords and scale choices evolve, making the whole thing into a sort of interactive music piece. No game framework was used, just plain javascript - I pulled in a library called Tone.js to generate the synthesizer sounds in the browser, and the GreenSock animation library for all the animation and 'tweening. I am currently working on re-creating this in Unity for mobile.

Cellular automata are a way to model natural processes (among other things) by defining discrete "cells", in this case a grid, and setting up simple sets of rules that affect the states of each cell over time. The well-known example is John Conway's Game of Life, which involves only 2 cell states (alive or dead) and a few transition rules. This was my attempt to extend that into something with more cell states (colors) and more interesting ways of setting up rules.

An implementation of a well known solution to the so-called "Stable Marriage" problem, in which one group of elements is matched to a second group of elements by some criteria of preference, and must end up in a "stable" configuration of pairs such that there are no two elements that would prefer each other over their current match.

This is a maze generator using something fancy called a Union-Find algorithm. To see it run, just press the "AMAZE" button, sit back, and wait for... a maze. The individual cells are joined into a 'forest' of larger and larger trees, until they're all one giant tree which means every cell can be reached by every other cell.

Another product of my interest in cellular automata (see above). I took a 2D Game of Life grid and 'echoed' it into three dimensions. The shapes are rendered to the canvas using an awesome library called ZDog.

The famous line of BASIC code 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 produces a random mazelike pattern by printing slashes and backslashes. It's so famous, someone wrote a book about it. This is my version of it.

Each "channel" features a different set of computations carried out for each "pixel" to decide how light or dark it is. It's essentially a set of simple, black-and-white custom shaders.

The background of this website uses the GreenSock Animation Platform to animate triangle shapes on a canvas, sequencing hundreds of small tween objects onto a timeline.

A simple web tool to help view stroboscopic animations. One application of this is animated turntable slipmat discs like this one.

A music video for a group I used to be in called Lowlands (check them out here). I did all the pixel art and animated every frame by hand using only MS Paint and Windows Movie Maker. A bullish commitment to the genre homage led to replacing the actual song with a 16-bit version I made.

I wanted to be a cartoonist for most of my childhood, and one year I revisited that dream in the form of webcomics. Unfortunately they trailed off a when I discovered a new interest that same year - coding!!!

A couple of albums full of musical experiments and songs. I used a few aleatoric compositional tricks of my own devising, and lots of software synths and found audio.