Unfinished Projects: 2025
For the past few years, I have been fortunate enough to take roughly 2 weeks off work to rest and spend time with my family. During this time, I often try to do some self-reflection. A trend I’ve noticed is that I start a lot of side-projects, but I almost never complete them. I derive a lot of joy from the “journey” (creating things, solving problems) and not the “destination”.
I’ve always held the opinion that fostering curiosity and willingness to explore ideas without expectation of a “deliverable” is an invaluable skill.
That said, I am starting to wonder about the long-term impact of never completing work. As a response, I’ve decided to start a new years-end tradition: catalogue some of the side-projects I worked on in the last year. Maybe this will re-ignite my passion for one of these projects. Perhaps it’s simply me parading my own failures.
Hopefully it will inspire others to share what they’re working on and normalize starting new projects (even if there’s no concrete destination in mind).
Projects are listed chronologically.
Storms of Inishkel
Storms of Inishkel was a 1-shot adventure I designed and wrote for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition (although it’s mostly system-agnostic). I worked on this from January through March. The story is inspired by on the Irish coastline and local folklore. I was able to run two play-tests for it, one of which was in a sea-side town in Ireland (near the real-world castle that inspired a large part of the plot).
A core principles for the project was to not let AI touch any part of the process. I wrote everything myself, did all of my research with paper books, and created all of the maps by hand. While I stand by that approach (now and always), it meant that I had to either create or buy artwork for the project. I had found some artists I was willing to commission for interior art, but I was naive enough to think I could pull off the cover art myself.
I produced several (digital) paintings of the Irish coastline, but nothing that captured the feel I was going for. Eventually my enthusiasm fizzled out.
A FoundryVTT Game System
Around the same time, I was also in the process of building a game system for Foundry Virtual Tabletop (table-top gaming was this years theme, apparently). Foundry enables you play games remotely and makes it feasible to develop new game systems using a bit of Javascript (ugh).
The development process is slow, and there are a lot of mechanics to build: character sheets, inventory, stats, dice rolling, chat messages, etc. Everything also needs to be themed appropriately, localized, and thoroughly tested.
The system I’m building (present tense, this project is ongoing) is really fun, but it’s not out yet, so I can’t share any additional details yet.
Random Terror
In May, I worked on a random character generator for I Don’t Belong Here by the fine folks at STATIONS. They created a spark-book for creating creepy creatures / situations. All the prompts are inspired by Radiohead songs and lyrics. It’s a rad project and I highly suggest you check it out.
I was working on a digital version of their roll tables: you could refresh the page to get a random combination of traits displayed along some of the amazing artwork that comes with the book. It was my first foray into web components. Sadly, a cross-country move prevented me from wrapping this up to coincide with the kickstarter launch and this sadly got put on the back-burner.
Source: ~zstix/random-terror
Modular TUI
Every so often, I get into a strange mood that compels me to write Rust. When the mood struck in August I concocted this ridiculous idea: what if you could make a modular synth patch in your terminal. In true UI-engineer-fashion, I focused on building out the visuals rather than making something that…you know…actually produces sound.
It’s really just me hard-coding some boxes. I spent way to much time on the logic to render the patch cables and then got distracted.
Source: ~zstix/modular-tui
NEWT Virtual Machine
I have always admired the uxn virtual machine. It’s so elegantly designed and unique. I have tried, multiple times, to learn Tal (the forth-style programming language which runs on the VM), but I struggled to learn the language and keep the memory layout in my head.
I thought it would be a fun idea to come up with my own VM / fantasy console targeting the aesthetics of the Apple II / IBM PC days. My end goal was to be able to recreate Visicalc (seen above…I only wish that was my work). There’s something liberating about creating your own machine to run your own programs. This idea still holds a lot of weight for me.
I have most of my planned opcodes created and I have the ability to display rudimentary graphics using a retro font sprite sheet (CP437-ish). Sadly, I spent too much of my enthusiasm on the early stages of writing the virtual machine. By the time I got to the assembler I was already super frustrated with weeks of debugging machine code and I threw in the towel.
Source: ~zstix/newt (spec doc)
Fellmark
My latest big project has been a rules-light TTRPG. In this game, you create a character and venture out into the woods. It’s giving Blair Witch + Sleepy Hollow (with a dash of the Witcher) vibes and it’s being designed from the ground-up to work with a Game Master (GM), as a solo game, or with a group an no GM.
Mechanically, there’s not a ton of unique elements, but the sum of it’s parts (the mechanics that I find most interesting) are hopefully compelling. There are no classes, your character is defined by choices made during character creation and through play. There are no “levels”, you gain XP and spend it at any time as a resource for character progression. There are no spell slots (or even defined spells), but there is magic. Players are encouraged to make up their own spells, following some pre-defined rules.
There is still loads more to write (I’m only about 40% done with the design) and I need to do a lot of play-testing. I will likely write about this more when it starts to crystallize.
Other Projects
In addition, I had a number of other unfinished projects I haven’t bothered to highlight:
- Some spooky ambient music for Halloween
- A gemini protocol browser written in C
- An esolang based on a grid layout
- A mobile-first VTT designed to support play-by-post
- A potion-crafting TTRPG-system
- A neovim plugin for LSP exploration (still working on that one)
- Countless blog posts I currently have in draft