Building Games, and Hex Crawling My Way Forward

Alright, January 5th, 2026. New year, let’s do this.

I’m kicking things off with a couple of new goals. First up: getting in shape. Yeah, I know that has absolutely nothing to do with automation, coding, or tech in general—but it’s important to me this year, so it’s happening.

Along those same lines of “doing things I’ve been meaning to do forever,” I really want to make a game.

Everyone’s gotta start somewhere, right? I’ve tried this a few times in the past—RPG Maker back in college, dabbling with Unreal Engine, poking at Godot (I think it was Godot?), but nothing ever really stuck.

This time around, the project actually started as something totally different: a hex map generator for D&D. I wanted a quick tool that could generate a hex grid with terrain, points of interest, all that good stuff—something I could drop into a hex crawl campaign with a bit of customization. I’ve never actually run a hex crawl before, but it’s been on my “someday” list for a while.

After spending about three hours hacking on it, I had this moment of “wait… this could actually be a chill little browser game.” So naturally, I pivoted. Now I’m in the process of turning it into an actual web-based game, and that’s where things stand right now.

I want to start posting more about the progress and actively working on it. The blog itself is mostly “done” at this point—I’m not making huge changes anymore, aside from the occasional UI tweak—so I can finally focus more on building things instead of rebuilding the site.

The current (very tentative) name is Hex Crawler. The inspiration is Ancient Domains of Mystery, if you’ve ever played it. It’s an old game I used to mess around with back in high school—super interesting, kind of brutal, and honestly pretty addictive. I’m not planning to make Hex Crawler that punishing, but I do want to borrow some of the core ideas: heavy use of randomly generated content, RPG-style progression, and that sense that every run is a little different. Maybe even some AI-generated content down the line, though I’m still figuring that part out.

The codebase is being written with AI assistance, and I’m using React. I’m not entirely sure how great React is for browser-based games long-term, but so far it feels smooth enough. We’ll see how it holds up.

Hopefully, in the next few days, I’ll have a production build live with a URL I can share. From there, we’ll see where it goes.

Anyway! 2026 goals so far: move more, make a game, build cool stuff. If you’re still reading this, thanks. More soon.

Later days.