The idea
I made these for my kids, and I guided them through building them. Most of it happened over two days in October 2026, with help from AI coding tools.
Hollowell House
A cartoon haunted house: 10 floors, 50 rooms. You find two vampires hiding in every room (100 in all) to earn the keys that get you from the Wine Cellar up to the attic. Glowing red eyes give away where they’re hiding.
Searching the wrong spot gets you things like “An old sock. Gross.” or “Only a squeaky toy duck.” Find a vampire and it shouts “BLEH!” At the end, a hundred little bats flap away squeaking.
Hollowell House 3D
Then it got rebuilt as a full 3D game in C with raylib, and shipped as a Windows program with its own icon. The changelog reads like a design diary:
| Version | What changed |
|---|---|
| 1.0 | A ghost, salt, and hiding |
| 1.1 | Ghost removed |
| 1.2 | One vampire per room (50 total) |
| 1.3 | Vampires hide in furniture, and rooms lock |
| 1.4 | Search markers, candle shadows, light shafts |
| 1.5 | Bigger rooms |
| 1.6 | Bug fixes and credits |
The engineer in me snuck in too. On first launch it checks the graphics card and picks a quality level, and if the frame rate drops under 40 it turns the quality down by itself. It also writes a log file next to the program, because of course it does.
The rest of the arcade
- Pepperoni Barrage, a one-screen arcade game set in a brick oven at night. It went through 21 versions.
- Stroller Run, version 7 through 12
- Blockfield, StarryHorns, and Hornfire
What I took from it
Kids are the most honest testers there are. When something isn’t fun, they tell you, and the next version changes.