One weekend, while I was working on finishing up my open port of Second Conflict, I was away from my intel laptop and picked up project Albatros.
Project Albatros was a little thought experiment that I started in October of 2025, using Amazon Q to see if I could build a lock and dam simulator. I have fond memories from my childhood at a children's center playing with a lock and dam system toy with moving water, gates, and pumps. It was the highlight of my day after spending the rest of the day walking around with my parents at an art show. As a Boy Scout, we also visited and got a tour of one of the locks and dams on the Mississippi River. It was running on a mainframe that took up an entire wall in the building next to the lock. Walking across the gates with high waves was also a bit terrifying as a kid.
I’ve been fairly impressed using Anthropic Claude to crank through software projects and make my creative ideas come to life without days of coding that cause a lot of wear on my old (Nintendo-damaged) hands. I was mostly delighted to see Claude really bring my ideas to life, and I quickly burned through my token allowance.
Once I had the lock and dam sim to a decent working state, I started daydreaming about other waterway-related games and how I could tie them all together. So I’ve spent the month of April building games and mini-games in Python Pygame. The results look like something out of the early 90s, and I can’t help but think that while I really enjoy working with Python, PyGame is holding me back from the bigger aspirations I have for the game. A lot of things I want to implement are clunky to do.
