Public Projects

Jacob Lowery

Programmer in Austin, TX

I build native software from the ground-up with a focus toward tooling, performance, and user experience.

Power Play

2024-2026

Top-down multiplayer shooter & engine

Distributed as a single executable file less than 10 MiB in size, Power Play is a server-authoritative top-down shooter & game engine built using a custom codebase written from the ground-up in C99 with zero third-party code/libraries or dependencies outside of the operating system.

Some highlights include millions of interactive, world-staining particles simulated & rendered during gameplay, fully network-synchronized live level editing, and custom in-engine tooling, such as a real-time instrumenting profiler.

Many of the paradigms & architecture used in building the project were influenced by Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, Ryan Fleury's Digital Grove articles, and The Rad Debugger codebase.


Minesweeper Online

2019

Minesweeper with online multiplayer

An experiment in utilizing as little network bandwidth as possible by communicating deterministic state deltas based on known seeds between client and server, allowing for a comical amount of players to join together on arbitrarily large board sizes in minesweeper.

Client/Server

Cellular

2018

Rule-based cellular automata engine

A tool for experimenting with cellular automata by defining rules in Lua scripts.

Cret World

2018

Evolving Neural Creatures

A simulation of tiny creatures with brains based on genetic sequences that mutate with each generation. Will they reach food and reproduce before they run out of energy, or will they lose out to a superior specimen and die?

Life

JMIDI

2017

Piano Roll MIDI Sequencer

A tool for creating MIDI songs inside a state-of-the-art user interface.