Portfolio
United Launch Alliance
I'm currently employed at United Launch Alliance. This has taken up a lot of my programming life since late 2022, and though I can't provide specific code samples here, my work has contributed to launching the Vulcan Centaur rocket, which is pretty neat.
The languages I've worked with at ULA include C++, Python, Perl, Ada, and Bash. I've mainly focused on integrating new flight software with a physics simulation engine, as well as modernizing our aging C++ code stack (C++03 to C++23).
Indie game projects
In recent years, my side projects have mostly taken the form of indie game development projects. I've never fully finished and released any of them, but I have learned a lot about how to architect a game project over the years, and done a few interesting things.
Delve (2022-2023, present)
Delve is a 3D sandbox game inspired by Minecraft. It's gone through a few iterations and rewrites over the years. I've never used a pre-built game engine for it, and making a full voxel sandbox from scratch is extremely technically difficult!
Iteration 1 of Delve was extremely small. I tried to focus mainly on multiplayer, since it's generally quite complicated. Multiplayer code proved to be a bit too difficult for my knowledge of game programming at the time, but you can find some details on how I started implementing things in my short-lived devlog series. I used C++ with OpenGL and SFML for rendering (though I started out with GLFW and swapped to SFML later on).
In iteration 2 of Delve, I was able to implement a 3D sandbox world with ambient occlusion, cubic chunks, collision detection, and block breaking / placement. This iteration was built in C++ using Vulkan and SFML. I ended up taking a hiatus for a couple of years to focus on work, and when I returned to this version to work on it further, some of the libraries I was using had been long-abandoned and I couldn't get it to compile anymore.
Iteration 3 of Delve was short-lived and was my attempt to rewrite what I had made in iteration 2 with far greater stability. However, the complex memory management in multithreaded C++ applications bit me a bit on the performance end, so I ended up switching to iteration 4, the current iteration, within a couple months.
This latest version has been in development since around the new year, and is written in Rust with wgpu. It hasn't quite reached the heights of iteration 2 (I'm focusing UI earlier, which has consistently been a pain point for me technically!) but I've currently got an infinite world generating, where you can place and break blocks of your choice, and it saves and loads your world from disk. It's been a really good learning experience to familiarize myself with Rust, which I've found to be a great language.
Duskbringer (2021)
Duskbringer is a metroidvania built in the Godot engine. I built this during my initial Hollow Knight kick, and I got as far as implementing enemies, room transitions, and proper combat before shifting focus to Delve to learn 3D graphics programming.
I also did a bit of concept art for areas during the game's development. I really like how this one came out, which was an exploration of the different types of environments you could find in the first region of the game.
Exonaut (2019)
Exonaut is a space exploration game I was developing in Unity. I managed to get a 3D spherical cube-based world generating with LODs (though this had significant distortion - trying to represent a sphere with cubes is hard).
I also managed to render volumetric nebulae in a No Man's Sky-inspired star map view. I never tied everything together into one big project, however; a universe-sized game turned out to be a bit over-ambitious for a first game effort, and I ended up suffering some burnout and shifting focus to other projects. I would love to explore this further at some point in the future, though; I think space exploration games have huge potential!
Minecraft modding
Minecraft has been one of my favorite video games for many years, and in college, once I felt familiar enough with programming, I started developing mods for the game. My modding efforts have been the most broadly popular things I've ever built, and I've learned a lot and met a lot of great people along the way.
No Man's Land (2024-present)
Most of my Minecraft modding efforts lately have been in the form of development for No Man's Land, a mod by a couple of close friends which I've contributed a fair bit of code to. I've mainly focused on world generation stuff and bug fixes, though there's a few other miscellaneous features that I've developed (such as an overhaul to placing rails).
Team Aurora (2019-2021)
I was a cofounder and the lead developer at Team Aurora, a Minecraft modding team that became fairly notable in the early "vanilla+" scene. Here's a list of the mods I handled most of the programming for (download counts accurate between all platforms as of March 2026):
- Enhanced Mushrooms (14.9M downloads) - adds a new wood set for giant mushrooms
- Bayou Blues (10.6M downloads) - adds a new bayou biome, based on the wetlands of the southern US
- Better Badlands (9.3M downloads) - adds a few new blocks and world generation features to improve vanilla Minecraft's badlands biome
- Abundance (7.8M downloads) - adds a few new flowery biomes to the world
- Fruitful (2.0M downloads) - tweaks how apples work to make them easier to farm
- Hanami (32.6k downloads) - adds a new cherry blossom forest biome
Pokitto games
From 2017-2018, I was fairly active in the community for the Pokitto, an open-source indie game console. This was my main introduction to C++ programming, and I made a couple of interesting games.
Arcade Classics (2017)
Arcade Classics is a collection of classic arcade games - Pong, Breakout, Snake, and Stacker. It was fairly simplistic, and mainly built as a project for me to learn the ropes of Pokitto's API, but it turned out to be decently popular in the community, and was included on a community-made game collection for the console.
Blocky World / Blockitto (2017-2018)
Blockitto (fka Blocky World) was a clone of Notch's Minicraft that I was working on in the tail end of my Pokitto days. It was a top-down 2D sandbox game, which gave me my first exposure to chunk systems and the challenges of developing a game with a large, dynamic world. I never released it (due to unfortunate technical issues on hardware!) but I learned a lot about game development during the process.
Scratch projects
Way back in the day, I started out my programming journey on MIT's Scratch. A lot of the stuff here is very cringe due to me making it as a small child, but it shows a lot of my early programming journey as I slowly began to grasp the fundamentals.
I had three main accounts, dividing my Scratch days into a few separate eras: - Kaden (2010-2013) - this account is mostly an elementary schooler making cheesy animations, but I did make a couple of games here as well. Nothing too impressive as this was right at the beginning of what would eventually become my career. - epicdude312 (2013-2016) - at this point, I was trying to make things a bit more "professionally", and started making proper thumbnails for my projects. The account started out with a few personal projects, though I also had several school projects uploaded here for middle and high school programming classes. Near the end here I started getting more confident building games and interacting with the Scratch community. - redyoshi857 (2016-2019) - this is when I started really taking things seriously and focusing on quality over quantity. I made several games (though not all of them have survived the last several years of Scratch updates), as well as a few other non-game projects that I later moved to side accounts: - RedYoshiTV has a few animations from this era. - DJYoshi857 for the OSTs of my games. Some of this was made by myself, though a few of the things here were from a YouTuber and used with permission. - RY857_Remix for somewhat low-effort "remixes" of other's projects (this was a common thing in Scratch's community during this era).
My most impressive works from Scratch are all game-related:
Yoshi's New Story (2016)
This really put my redyoshi857 account on the map. It's a Yoshi fan game and follows that series' formula of 2D side-scrollers. At the point it released, I believe it was the largest platformer ever made in Scratch by number of screens (though I think it's since been overtaken).
Mode 7 Engine (2017)
Scratch has changed their pen system since I released this, so it currently has strange bugs, but this was my initial foray into the 3D world. I pretty much stumbled upon perspective projection by messing around with trig functions, and built this SNES Mode 7-inspired rendering engine (though due to my lack of knowledge about 3D graphics, it didn't have any kind of depth buffer beyond distance-sorting billboard sprites).
Super Mario Scralaxy (2018)
Super Mario Scralaxy is a collaborative Mario fan game that was developed in tandem by me and several other users on the platform. I made one of the biggest updates for the game, which introduced a main menu, a proper story mode, a hub world, and more.