Previous Projects

In this post, I will detail some projects that I’ve had a hand in before I created this site. Since I’ll be writing about my future side projects in these posts anyway, it makes sense to also have my previous projects in a blog post too.

These are the projects I’ll be writing about:

1. Vax
2. RESC
3. web-scrape-rs

Vax

Vax is a mobile video game for Android made with Godot. This was actually a school project for CS 191 and 192, which required us to plan out and implement a software project. The team that made this consisted of me, Aira Aloveros, Kurt Ian Khalid Israel, and Jeremy Vincent Yu. In this project, we had a flat structure of leadership, where we just laid out what needs to be done on weekly standups, and then divide up the work between us.

The video game was about managing a pandemic in the Philippines. It was actually a timely topic because we were still locked in our homes due to COVID-19 when we made this game. It’s a somewhat more complicated Plague Inc. at its core, where you get money to find parts of the vaccine. Once you get parts, it’s up to you to combine them and test it out to patients before releasing them to the public. The mechanic of combining parts to make vaccines and testing them out was partly inspired by the different vaccines being released with varying effectiveness (Pfizer, Gamelan, J&J).

Trying out Godot 3 for this game was fun for me, since I’ve ardently followed Godot’s progress since the release of Godot 3. I like the flexibility of scenes, and for a simple game like this, Godot really shines through with its small size and an actual 2D renderer. However, having flexibility also meant that we had to figure out some things for ourselves, like how to switch scenes while retaining the state of the game. But I get it though. Every game is different, which means every game might need a different solution for that. Personally, I had fun thinking up of a solution for our problem, and it wasn’t that hard to code it once I understood how our scene-switching system would work. I’d still recommend Godot for anyone getting into game development. OSS FTW!

You can find the code for our game here.

RESC

RESC is the Residential Electrical Service Calculator, a school project for Engineering 150. It is an app meant to help electrical engineers solve the electrical load of a single-family dwelling unit as prescribed by the Philippine Electical Code. It was made with Dart and Flutter, and I really enjoyed making it since it was the first time in a while that I was able to break out Dart and Flutter.

I was the lone programmer who worked on this, but the idea and design wasn’t done by me. This was a group project, and I think someone else gave the idea in the first place, and someone else also designed the UI of the app. Unfortunately, I am not able to remember all the people who worked on this project (except for Zaira dela Calzada, who was a blockmate of mine in my first year in UP Diliman), so if you’re one of them, I thank you greatly for the contribution.

To be honest, I think this app has a lot of potential to be useful to electrical engineers in the Philippines. It’s a shame that we never bothered to release it on Google Play, but we all had other responsibilities to do, and it’s open-source anyway. I might be tempted to place it on F-Droid one day if it catches my interest, but for now, I have other things to do so I can’t attend to it.

web-scrape-rs

(Sorry I don’t have a picture; it’s a CLI program.)

This is a simple CLI program to get the HTML of a website. It was written in Rust, and I made it as a practice project back when I was learning Rust. I used the reqwest library for this and it’s easy to use.

I don’t have much to say about this project. It’s a fairly simple one, even though written in a language with a steep learning curve. Unfortunately, I haven’t been writing Rust for a few years now since I don’t really have a use for it, but I really owe Rust a lot for introducing me to the wonders of static typing and functional programming. I really wish Typescript would introduce the Result and Option types because they make programming so much better.

Anyway, that’s all of the projects I’ll talk about. I hope I can write more in the future!