Robert MacDonald · software, games and the engineering behind them
Case studies from seven projects: the problem each one solved, the decisions behind the design, what went wrong and how every fix was confirmed. Seven of the projects run in a browser today, including Ship Voyage (published as Ports of Call), Ironvale and VoxelBlox. Every figure on this page comes from a nightly measurement of the work itself.
Read first
Case studies written after the work: the problem, the decisions behind the design, what went wrong, and how each fix was confirmed.
VoxelBlox · September 2026
An architecture and engineering case study of an endless, procedurally generated voxel world in Python: the decisions and trade-offs, how it was verified, incident reviews, and a graphics-card renderer built to meet its frame budget.
VoxelStrike · September 2026
A plain-language account of how VoxelStrike is built: a 1992 landscape-drawing technique rebuilt in Python and moved to the graphics card, an endless world, vehicles made of boxes, and how every problem was measured and fixed.
Project Cockpit
Engineering notes on Fleet Command: a house full of ordinary computers turned into one AI and compute service, with GPU sharing, models that sleep when idle, jobs that move to idle machines, and telemetry on all of it. What was built, what was measured, and what each mistake taught.
CodeAtlas
Engineering notes on CodeAtlas, a tool that measures a large personal codebase accurately: every project re-measured nightly, analysed, opened to AI agents, and turned into a portfolio whose figures can show their working. What it does, how it is built, and the twenty mistakes that shaped it.
VoxelBlox
Engineering notes on Voxel Racers, an arcade racer built inside a Python voxel world. The browser version bakes what the game computes, rewrites only the rules that run each tick, and is checked against recordings of the original, tick for tick.
VoxelBlox
How Voxel Racers is converted from a Python game to a browser game, step by step: the engine boundary, the bake, rules as data, recordings, sounds, the JavaScript runtime, stepwise parity checks, per-course builds, packaging under a 25 MiB limit and a one-command release on a fleet of machines.
NBLidar
Engineering notes on NBLidar: New Brunswick's open laser surveys turned into a 1-metre block world that runs in a browser, built one square kilometre at a time across a small fleet of machines and served from Cloudflare's edge. What was built, what was measured, and what went wrong.
Open it now
Each opens in a browser, with nothing to install. Where there are notes on how it was built, they sit under it.
Play it in your browser
Voiced Adventure Game Hosted Entirely on Cloudflare
A voiced Age-of-Exploration adventure game that runs entirely on Cloudflare, with no server of its own.
Set sail in your browserPlay it in your browser
Real-Time Strategy Game With No Server
A complete strategy game delivered as a single file, in which two players connect directly with no server in between.
Play Ironvale
Play it in your browser
Open-World Building Game
An open-world game for digging, building, driving and flying, in which code generates every texture, model, sound and piece of music.
Play Voxel Racers in your browserExplore it live
New Brunswick as a 3D Block World
Turns New Brunswick's open LiDAR surveys (laser measurements of the land) into a 1-metre block world anyone can explore in a browser, in English and French.
Explore New Brunswick in 3D
Visit the site
Voice-First Android Keyboard
An Android keyboard built around speech, with transcription on a self-hosted server and prediction and autocorrect on the device.
Visit the Ownword site
Visit the site
Business Website
The website for an automation and applied-AI business, designed so the public pages and the private back end never meet directly.
Visit the live sitePlay it in your browser
Maths Adventure for Kids
A maths adventure for children, from counting to fractions and early algebra, with voice coaching, music and RPG battles, in one self-contained HTML file that works offline and is published at number-dragon.pages.dev.
Play Quest of the Number DragonAnd the rest
Projects with a write-up but nothing to open in a browser: desktop tools, services and the systems behind the ones above.
About
I design and build automation and AI systems that are dependable enough to run every day: they check their own results, pick up where they left off after a failure, and keep a record of everything they did. These are not one-off tools. On my own time it has meant more than 90 independent software projects, from AI services to a 3D game engine.