So it’s official – as of yesterday, I have completed my studies and earned my Master of Science degree in Information! It’s a great moment for me, although a little bittersweet. My plans are still unknown, but for the short term I am staying in Michigan. In the meantime, this gives me a great opportunity to work on some of my own personal projects, and I felt now is as good of a time as any to list them all, both for my benefit and that of my readers:
- Nutty Bolts: an online multiplayer word association game, similar to Apples to Apples. It’s in been in a playable beta status for a while now, although more testing and tweaking would always be helpful. I’m also interested in building some more learning opportunities into the game – for instance, I’ve heard the suggestion to tailor it towards learning languages, which I think would be really cool.
- Readerfall: a visualization / art project to show stories in your Google Reader, organized into columns by feed, and detailing the age and date of each story. I’m mainly doing this to teach myself Processing and try out an artistic visualization style.
- VizierFX: an open-source library that draws network graphs in Flash. It’s workable now, but there are so many things to be improved on it.
And here are projects that I’m not yet actively working on, but are in the pipeline somewhere and may or may not see the light of day:
- Battleground: a political election simulator, played turn-based-strategy style. I’m hoping for a lot of possibilities for viable strategies (both in terms of different candidates and different tactics), and that it gets done before 2012 (or even better, 2010).
- BlueShift Hockey: a visualization of shifts taken by NHL players during hockey games. I did this project earlier using JavaScript, but I canned it because of technical difficulties and because there was another similar site. However, I might resurrect it if there is interest.
- Sustainability game: No real concept of how this project might work, but I’m looking to do a simulation to foster a discussion on sustainable local resource use.
- Beware the Penguins: an arcade-style game I had developed about 12 years ago that I think would work really well in Flash.
And there you have it. Regardless of how the job search goes, I think you can agree that I’ll have my hands full!