Ethan Crooks

Raspberry Pi Bluetooth Receiver June 2026

I wanted a bluetooth receiver to play music on my amp, and I thought why buy one when I've get a perfectly good Raspberry Pi sitting around. I initially followed blogposts of other people doing similar stuff - namely this one - which got the basics working, but I'm now hooking up other features, including status LEDs, a web server to control it over LAN, and auto-playing from a USB disc reader so I can play CDs with it.
Currently using bluez-alsa and a custom python script using D-Bus.

Enemy AI Round Manager May 2026 - Present

As a part of a prototype for an indie game project, I'm working in Unreal on a round structure system for a tactics game, aiming to be a hybrid between turn-based and real-time strategy systems.
Enemies all take their turns simultaneously, but have to wait their turn to perform actions, allowing the camera to frame the action without keeping the player waiting.

TTRPG Character Sheet Webapp 2026ish (WIP)

A web app built with Typescript and Preact. Still a work in progress, but aims to be a fully featured character sheet for me and my friend's D&D 5e games. After that, I'm hoping to make the layout data-driven enough to be easily adapted to whatever TTRPG we want to play.
Includes a similar dice roll parser as the Rust one I wrote a while back, but instead of doing the Typescript implementation all over again, I used ohm-js to write a parser grammer.

Roll20 Token Marker Extension March 2026

A browser extension for me and my friends using Roll20. There's a feature to mark tokens with 0-9 using your keyboard, but I noticed using the browser console to put any message you want works just fine, so I made a browser extension to work with that.
My first time making a browser extension, I expected it to be fiddly and it kinda was, but I had fun anyway.

Discord OAuth Authentication Server 2025

A authentication server written in Rust, to allow me to place otherwise unauthenticated NGINX services behind a Discord login. Used so I can host something and have it accessable to my friends without them needing to fiddle around with HTTP basic auth.
Rust's oauth2 package has great documentation - was dead easy to get things up and running.

Final Year Project October 2022 - May 2023

For my dissertation, designed and developed a VR teaching tool for the Royal School of Artillery, for which I received a Commander’s Commendation.

RIGPR - Farm Frenzy October 2022 - April 2023

During my final year at university, I worked with 14 other developers on a motion-tracked 4 player VR project.

Sumo Digital Placement September 2021 - September 2022

In between my second and third years at university, I joined Sumo Sheffield as a placement programmer working on an unannounced title.

DnD Dice Parser July 2021

A DnD dice syntax parser and interpreter à la Roll20, written in Rust.
I've written hackish parsers before, but after learning about the Nom library I decided to have a go at doing it "properly".
Also doubling as my first sizeable project in Rust, I found using Nom to lex the input and parse into a syntax tree to be really satisfying to implement.
You can find a quick and dirty wasm implementation here.

PRAPI - Lightroom January 2021

A model loader and lighting engine as another OpenGL exercise.
I learned how to work with Assimp to read 3D model files, and how to implement the Phong reflection model using multiple lights.
I got started with Powershell, using a script as a build system. This build system turned out to be more of a curse than a blessing, a lesson in how I should probably use actual build systems for most cases!

On Demand Minecraft January 2021

A system to host a private Minecraft server which shuts down when no-one is online to save money. Users can log into a website to turn the server back on again when they want to play.
Made using Flask and AWS's API. A very fun project to make, where I learned a lot about Linux services and how to Unix-like programs communicate with each other.
AWS's pricing structure has changed since I made this, making this project no longer viable. I still learned a ton from it!

GPROG - C# Magic: The Gathering Engine December 2020

For my uni's GPROG programming unit, I made a barebones MTG engine in C#. I made it a standalone library, so it could theoretically be slotted into Unity or other C# systems.
To test it, I made another C# program to host the programs state over HTTP, so it could be processed by Javascript for a simple web viewer.

GMTK2020 - Total System Failure July 2020

A single-stick shooter where your ship's systems get hacked.
Made over a weekend for the 2020 Game Maker's Toolkit games jam.

OpenGL Spaceship Game May 2020

An infinite runner spaceship game as an OpenGL exercise. This is my first fully functional OpenGL game, where I experimented with shaders and chunk loading.
Making games "the hard way" has been really fun and interesting, strengthening my understanding of the underlying systems in game engines.

OpenGL Mandelbrot Set February 2020

A quick exercise in fragment shaders in OpenGL.
I've recently been getting to grips with OpenGL through this tutorial - this is my first project from that which I'm fairly proud of. I'm very excited to work with shaders some more in the future!

The Wall of Voyages January 2020

I built an online quest manager for the DND group I am a part of. Using Flask and Bootstrap with a Redis database, it allows people to create, join and manage quests.
I also experimented with Discord bots, setting up automated announcements and commands.

TDEMO - Steamcraft November 2019

Made in a team of 4 over 3 weeks, I got to grips with Unity's prefab system to create a ship designer. I really enjoyed making this - with the little logical challenges involved with making sure each configuration is valid, bringing the ship data from scene to scene, and creating a user interface intuitive enough to make ship building easy.
While playing, individual ship components can get damaged and broken, affecting how your ship handles.

TDEMO - Spookhouse October 2019

Made in a team of 4 over a week, I experimented with 2D lighting systems to create a tense atmosphere. I found it worked very well given the limited timeframe we had.

TDEMO - Grapplebox September 2019

The first game I made at university! We were given a week to make a game with a single control. I experimented with rigidbody physics in Godot, making a 2D sandbox which you can grapple around using your mouse.

Online Spellbook July 2019

Using Flask and Bootstrap, I built an online spellbook for the DND group I am a part of. As more homebrew spells were added the static pages we were using became increasingly unwieldy. This site has filters making finding spells a lot easier.

Minmax Chess AI 2018

After reading about min-max strategies in AI, I tried out making my own implementation with a Chess AI in Python. It worked better than I expected, building a decision tree and looking several moves ahead. It can beat me, although admittedly I'm not very good at chess.

Super Hexagon in TIC-80 November 2017

A clone of one of my favourite games made in the TIC-80 fantasy console. It was really fun to make, lots of tricky geometric challenges with the TIC-80's limited drawing commands. I really want to come back to this project and flesh it out more since there's a lot I've learned since this projects, especially after working with similar engines like Love2D.

ETHAN CROOKS

Projects