Welcome to my personal blog! My goal is to update this from time to time about whatever is on my mind. I hope you find this interesting! For now I'm putting everything on one page, but I'll likely change up the organization here once I get more content.
Reflecting on 2025 and my first commercial game project (˶ˆᗜˆ˵)
Happy new year! 
2025 was a big year for me in my gamedev career. Early in the year my wife gifted me a cute little
handheld
console called a Playdate. 
If you've never
heard of it, it's like an original Gameboy crossed with a Kindle, but with a little crank bolted
onto the
side. My artistic representation:
I had been eyeing this little machine up since it was first announced back in 2021 so getting it as a gift was an amazing surprise!
I was (and still am) working on another project but I really really wanted to make something for this cute little console. I resolved to make something in just two months, so I wouldn't distract from my other project too much. I wracked my brain for ideas and thought back to some of my old projects...
Over a decade ago, I took an intro computer science class in university, and I soon tried to make my own game without any idea what I was doing. I knew nothing about art, but managed to make a simple character in MS Paint and got them moving around on screen. Here's that character from way back in 2014:
That first project never went anywhere, and I always felt bad that I didn't do anything with my little knight character. Now over a decade later, I thought back to this this little knight, and decided to make a small game centred around them that used the Playdate's unique crank feature. A crank-knight. I called the game CranKnight!
After exactly two months I hit my target and released the first iteration of CranKnight to itch.io on
April
10th 2025. This was the first time I released a game for actual money, and to my surprise people
actually
purchased it! 
I started getting really nice
comments
and even a YouTube
review! It
was really
incredible, I'm still so grateful for that early support.
Some comments told me to apply for the Playdate Catalog, the official store for Playdate games that offers access to a scoreboard API and additional visibility. To my additional surprise, CranKnight was accepted, and had a slated release date of August 5th 2025.
With this extended time until the catalog release, I thought of all of the things I wanted to add to CranKnight that I had to cut in order to hit my 2 month deadline. I resolved to keep my other project on the backburner to fully realize my vision of CranKnight!
By July I had released the 1.1
version, which completely overhauled the game. I got amazing feedback from it, and
really felt great about the state of the game.
Some minor fixes later and it was finally release day! It was surreal to see my game mentioned by the official Playdate Bluesky account.
While I was happy with the game, I had the nagging thought that I should make use of the official
scoreboard API, but I wasn't sure how I would make use of it. One of my players kept asking for
scoreboard
integration, so I kept thinking how I could do something interesting with it.
Eventually I thought of adding a high score mode, where enemies give you points and you choose challenges to boost the score. I released version 1.2 on the catalog (you can see the notes here), and finally felt like the project was done.
Since then I've had a lot of fun hearing people enjoying the game and learning the marketing side of game development. This is a whole new world to me that I'm not used to, but it got me to get more involved in social media, and eventually making an official web site for the game right here!
If you're still reading, thank you so much for taking the time to learn the story of CranKnight. And
if
you're a supporter of CranKnight, I really want to thank you from the bottom of my heart, you made a
dream
of mine come true.
I feel extra
energized to
get back to my other game project and hope this is a first step
to being a professional gamedev as my day job!
Till next time!
- Caden 
The DinoSire website is live! ◝(ᵔᗜᵔ)◜
Hey there! My name's Caden, but I tend go by DinoSire online. On impulse I resolved to make a
website, so
here it is, I hope you find it interesting and/or entertaining in some way.
⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂)⸝♡
The last time I tried to make a website was in highschool in the late 2000s where we were making
oldschool
HTML tables by hand, it was terrible. I feel like web design has come a long way since then
though
hahaha.
I recently saw a few YouTube videos about the indie web movement, which feels like a revival of the good 'ol days of small, personal and fun websites. It made me want to try to make my own website in this style, so here we are!
I'm a programmer professionally, but haven't really dug into web dev since my highschool days, so it was fun to give it a try. There's a lot I want to do still, but I hope it's a good start!
My plan for this site is to have my own personal space on the internet, while showing some of my personal projects.
In my spare time I like to make pixel art and work on little games. I've participated in a few game jams in the past, made a game for the Playdate handheld console, and am working on a little game coming to Steam. I hope to share more about these projects and my art in the future!
Till next time!
- Caden