Hello!

Welcome to euphory.gay, the blog and personal project showcase of me, Aliya! Here you can look at all the things I’ve been up to recently, read my ramblings about what I’m thinking about now, and maybe find the occasional book or game recommendation.

Projects

Here are some of my recent projects, just to give you a taste:

HACK*MATCH and Kabufuda Solitaire

These are two games designed by the incredible studio Zachtronics, adapted by me to run on the TI-84 Plus CE and TI-83 Premium CE graphing calculators! The art for the former is overwhelmingly taken from their own NES version, with all the code originally written by me; the latter is both my code and my art. Because who doesn’t want to play arcade games on their calculators?

HACK*MATCH is a fast-paced match-4 game. Move matching files into groups of 4 to remove them and score points. Files will continue to be added from the top; if they reach the bottom, it’s game over! Groups larger than 4 score bonus points. Two stars placed next to each other will destroy all matching files, but score no points. The higher your score gets, the faster the files will come!

Kabufuda Solitaire is a variant of solitaire based on that in the Zachtronics game Last Call BBS (highly recommended, obviously). The game is played by stacking matching cards on top of each other. Stacks of matching cards may be moved as a unit. By stacking all four of a set of matching cards directly on the table (i.e. with no other cards on top of them), they are collapsed into an immovable unit. There are also four free cells, though three start locked and are only unlocked one by one as sets of cards are collapsed on the tableau. The game is won when all cards are collapsed.

If either of these interest you – or, indeed, the idea of putting games on graphing calculators – you should head over to Cemetech and take a look at what the community gets up to!

Vega

Vega (or vega, or vega.euphory.gay) is a still-under-development alternative way of interacting with Pitt’s course catalog. Currently, its search function is its only presentable feature, but I’ve been using it myself for a little while ago just because some of the filters it provides are, if I say so myself, quite useful.

If you’re a Pitt student, and you have any frustrations at all regarding Pitt’s catalog search, class search, degree planner, etc: please, don’t hesitate to email me at aliya@euphory.gay or get in touch with me any other way you can to share your perspective or any features you might like to see an alternative to provide!