Websites and systems
Every entry answers the same three questions, whether it is live, paused or still on the bench. Most of them taught me something I used on the next one, which is the only reason the unfinished ones are worth showing.
01
At 299 Kirkdale, coffee happens in the morning and wood-fired pizza at night. The website became useful when Friday bookings had to fit the actual room: live capacity for customers, a night view for staff, and fewer phone calls in the middle of service.
02
Plant-led events caterer in Sydenham. The page lets the plates do the persuading, then asks for a date and a guest count. No booking engine, no CMS, and nothing for Jack to maintain between jobs.
03
A dark comedy RPG about a South London wedding and a town that has done this before. It is a wedding present, which I assumed meant a small job: write the jokes, draw the town, hand it over on the day. Instead I learned the whole pipeline. Godot, GDScript, tilemaps, dialogue trees, save states, and how to make flat pixels look lit. 107 scripts, 393 dialogue files, three endings so far. I now know more about this engine than I am ever likely to need again, and I am still going.
01 · The town
02 · The noticeboard
03 · A conversation
04 · One of three endings04
A turn-based browser RPG with a party, turn order, grid movement and dialogue written in JSON. I wanted to know how far an ordinary web stack could go before it stopped feeling like a game. It went further than I expected. I stopped anyway.
05
A website enquiry lands in an inbox and a spreadsheet without renting a form builder to move it there. Boring on purpose. I got tired of watching people pay every month for a POST request.
06
One thing goes in; crops, captions and a schedule come out in three platform-shaped versions. It solves a real Sunday-night problem for exactly the people least likely to install a workflow tool.
07
10pm, watching South Park with my daughter: wouldn't it be cool if Faith+1 had a patch. That should have remained an offhand sentence. By 10:30 I was deep in black-metal logo generators. Some weeks of pretending I knew what I was doing later, an actual embroidered patch arrived from America. It is here because the process was the same as the paid work: somebody says a thing, then comes the boring part where you have to finish it.
01 · The idea
02 · The redraw
03 · Digitised
04 · In hand