Games & Personal Explorations
Games & Personal Explorations
A collection of passion projects exploring interactive design, data visualization, and game development. Built using Unity, Pygame, Flask, and JavaScript, these projects reflect experimentation with UI systems, creative coding, and visual storytelling—from isometric games to a real-time aurora tracking app.
A collection of passion projects exploring interactive design, data visualization, and game development. Built using Unity, Pygame, Flask, and JavaScript, these projects reflect experimentation with UI systems, creative coding, and visual storytelling—from isometric games to a real-time aurora tracking app.
Background & Research
The aurora app started as an experiment in using public NOAA data to build a real-time dashboard. Once I found a few reliable data sources, I wanted to do more than just show raw numbers. I used historical KP index values as a scrolling visual border and layered in two types of aurora imagery for both context and visual depth. This was a fun challenge in looping over API data and creating a functional, readable interface using only free resources.
For the isometric game Space Lab 76, I wanted to create something visually original. My goal was to combine styles from the 1950s to the 1980s so you couldn’t quite place the era. I’m drawn to early computer tech, and this aesthetic was both personal and nostalgic, especially for Gen Xers who lived through the tech boom of the 70s to 90s. I designed everything from scratch — nothing borrowed, nothing copied — to explore a world that felt both familiar and strange.
The third prototype, a Unity game, leans into lowbrow surrealism. You play as a walking house with legs, intercepting stylized UFOs before they abduct a cow with two butts. The art direction was intentionally weird. I wanted it to feel like something you haven’t seen before — not based on fan art or a franchise, but a truly strange little world.
Key Insight
All of these are real, coded projects built from scratch, and each one reflects a different kind of creative risk: whether it’s making raw NOAA data feel alive, blending decades of tech design into an original game, or turning absurdist lowbrow sketches into a playable prototype.
Aurora App
■ Demo - https://andyfriedl.pythonanywhere.com/
■ Code - https://github.com/andyfriedl/aurora-dashboard-flask-demo
■ Code - https://github.com/andyfriedl/aurora-dashboard-flask-demo
Space Lab 76
Real-time aurora activity tracking and KP index forecasts from NOAA. Track aurora visibility with live data, graphs, and forecasts to catch the best viewing times.
Scene from “Space Lab 76” — a retro sci-fi puzzle game where a robot recovers microdata fragments to unlock security doors. Built with Pygame, all assets and gameplay ideas are original.
Scene from “Space Lab 76” — a retro sci-fi puzzle game where a robot recovers microdata fragments to unlock security doors. Built with Pygame, all assets and gameplay ideas are original.
Scene from “Space Lab 76” — a retro sci-fi puzzle game where a robot recovers microdata fragments to unlock security doors. Built with Pygame, all assets and gameplay ideas are original.
Scene from “Space Lab 76” — a sample of the assets
