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Emery's
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Welcome to my homepage!!!

I'm Emery Reszka. I study Computer Science at Florida Gulf Coast University and graduate in May 2027. This is where I keep the games I've made: a JRPG in GameMaker and a top-down RPG in C++, both mostly to practice procedural generation. Every button on these pages goes to the real thing, except the flashing ones, which go to an error box.

The games

Project Alpha

A turn-based JRPG in GameMaker Studio 2, starring my real-life friends.

Engine	GameMaker Studio 2
Status	On the backburner
Get it	Game Jolt

Enter the Alpha shrine »

Project Beta WIP!

Project Beta: the starting town, with a road, a pond and forest

A top-down RPG in C++ and SDL2 that generates a whole new world from every seed.

Language	C++17 + SDL2
Status	In progress
Get it	Not yet

Enter the dungeon » · Dev log

News

Sep 2026: New homepage. The old one is in the Recycle Bin.
Sep 2026: The software moved out. It lives on my professional site now; the basement is games only.

The Basement Webring This site is owned by Emery. Four sites, one basement.

This page was last updated 9/27/2026. Made by hand in a text editor. No frames, no Flash, no Java applets, no counters that lie.

Project Alpha

~*~ a turn-based JRPG starring my real-life friends ~*~

Under construction. On the backburner, not forgotten.

About the game

A turn-based JRPG in GameMaker Studio 2, with my real-life friends as the characters. I made it mainly to practice procedural generation. It's currently on the backburner, but far from forgotten.

Screenshots

Project Alpha: the party in a turn-based battle

Click a picture to see it full size.

Download

Get it on Game Jolt

Engine	GameMaker Studio 2
Language	GML
Genre	Turn-based JRPG
Status	On the backburner

The Basement Webring

Last updated: 9/27/2026 (this page). The game: not since it went on the backburner.

Thanks for visiting my shrine. Back to the Zone.

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Project Beta

a top-down RPG in C++ with SDL2

Under construction. Every seed is a different world; so is every build.

About

A top-down RPG I'm writing in C++17 with SDL2, with no engine. Every seed generates a 3000 by 3000 tile world: biomes, rivers, cliffs, fifteen settlements joined by roads, and nine kinds of dungeon. Fights are bullet-hell battles. I started it in April 2026 to practice procedural generation.

What went wrong along the way, and how I found it, is in the dev log.

Download

Not yet. It isn't done. When it is, the button will be here and it will be green. The source is public.

Read the source

Screenshots

Project Beta: cliffs and plateaus on a snowfield

Project Beta: a cave dungeon with an enemy and a piece of loot

Click a picture to see it full size.

Language	C++17
Library	SDL2 + SDL2_image
Genre	Top-down RPG
World	3000 × 3000 tiles, generated from a seed
Status	In progress

The Basement Webring

Last updated: 9/27/2026 (this page). The game changes every run and every build.

You descend. Back to the Zone.

Dev Log

Project Beta: what broke, and how I found out why

Newest first. Every number here was measured, mostly by small tools I wrote to render or count the world without opening the game. Pictures come from those same tools.

Sep 30: Dashes crawling over the ground

Fullscreen, thin dark dashes appeared across the grass and moved as I walked. Windowed they never showed up. Later, at zooms like 0.75x, the player wobbled by a pixel and the tile seams shimmered while scrolling.

How I found it

Fullscreen the frame was scaled by 2.25, so tile edges landed on quarter pixels and sometimes sampled the row of the neighbouring sprite in the tile sheet. I matched the bad rows pixel for pixel to the tree art above the grass. The fix was to draw each frame at 1:1 and scale it once. The wobble came from float rounding at fractional zooms, so the camera now keeps its position in whole screen pixels.

Aug 10 to Sep 29: Cliffs, four times

Cliffs and plateaus on a snowfield, built from stamped landforms

The cliffs started as flat brown tiles, then a nine-slice, then a set of drawing rules copied from how MOTHER 1 draws its cliffs. Each version broke somewhere new: corners halfway down a face, ground sealed inside walls, pillars nobody could reach.

What finally worked

Stop drawing cliffs by rule. The world now stamps whole landforms: big ones spliced from the full MOTHER 1 overworld at seams where every 2×2 block of sprites already exists in that map, small ones grown from my own island drawings with wave function collapse.

Sep 27: A world that wraps

The whole world of seed 387, one pixel per tile: rivers in navy, roads in blue, towns in yellow, the wasteland in brown

I joined the map's edges so you can walk off one side and come back on the other. The edges met, but the land didn't: every noise pattern, smoothing filter and river still treated the edge as an edge, so the ground stopped dead at the seam.

The hard part

Every stage of generation had to treat the joined axis as a circle, from the coastline smoothing to the rivers stepping across. Then the biome mix had drifted, so I retuned it until eight test seeds were within a point of the old worlds (sand 4.3% against 4.6%). A census tool checks the seam's two edges against every other pair of neighbouring lines.

Above: the whole world, one pixel to the tile. Fifteen settlements and the roads joining them.

Aug 14: Sixteen seconds to build a world

The player waits while the world generates, and it took 15.6 seconds.

How I fixed it

I timed every stage first. One pass asked "is there snow within fifty tiles?" for every desert tile, a 101×101 scan each time; it now runs once for the whole map. A smoothing filter recounted its 49-tile window for every tile, 17 times over 9 million tiles; it now slides the window instead. 15.6 seconds became 2.9, and a hash of all nine million tiles proved each change built the exact same world.

Aug 9: Towns in the middle of nowhere

The starting town, with a road, a pond and forest

Moats, winding paths and buildings kept showing up out in the wilderness, with working doors into real interiors that nobody had placed.

How I found it

Reading the code didn't find it; my first theory was wrong. So I made the generator snapshot the map after each of its two dozen stages and diffed them. The town stage was reading two empty town layouts that were declared one row tall, so the loop read about 97 KB past a 624-byte array, straight into the real starting town's layout, shifted by a row. That's why the junk looked hand-made.

Aug 7: Enemies stacking on each other

A cave dungeon with an enemy (red) and a piece of loot (gold)

Enemies chasing you through a cave merged into one sprite. My separation pass pushed overlapping pairs apart twice per frame, and it still wasn't enough.

How I measured it

A stress test over 900 frames: in a one-tile corridor the closest two enemies sat 0.42 pixels apart, against a 14-pixel sprite. Each sweep only moves a push one link along a queue, so I sweep until nothing overlaps (at most 32 times). Closest approach went to about 15 pixels in every test, with zero overlapping frames.

The Basement Webring

Last updated: 10/1/2026. The source for all of this is on GitHub.

Back to Beta · Back to the Zone

Links

Me, elsewhere

My professional site: my résumé and my software projects.
Résumé (PDF)
github.com/eareszka: my source code.
LinkedIn
YouTube: also playable in Media Player on the desktop.

Cool sites

I don't have a links page of other people's sites. That was the one part of a 2000 homepage I couldn't do honestly.

The Basement Webring

Last updated: 9/27/2026.

Back to the Zone

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System Properties

System:: The Basement 98
Second Edition
Registered to:: Emery Reszka
B.S. Computer Science, Florida Gulf Coast University
Expected May 2027
Computer:: Osprey, Florida. Will relocate within the state.
U.S. citizen, no sponsorship needed.
Looking for software engineering internships and 2027 graduate roles.
Background:: NCAA Division I swimmer for four seasons at UW–Milwaukee, 20 to 40 hours a week alongside a full course load.
UPS preloader during the school year.
Aquatics staff at IMG Academy, summer 2026.

Résumé (PDF)

skills.txt - Notepad

SKILLS.TXT  -  Emery Reszka
=============================

LANGUAGES
  Python, Java, C, TypeScript, JavaScript, SQL, R, HTML

FRAMEWORKS AND TOOLS
  Django, React Native with Expo, PyTorch, SDL2, PyInstaller,
  Git, Linux under WSL, Win32 API, REST APIs, JSON

CONCEPTS AND PRACTICE
  Object-oriented programming, data structures and algorithms,
  computer vision, integrating LLM APIs, prompt engineering,
  Agile sprints

SCHOOL AND JOBS
  Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers
    B.S. Computer Science, expected May 2027
  University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, School of Engineering
    Computer Science coursework, Sep 2022 - May 2026,
    before transferring to FGCU
  NCAA Division I swimmer, UW-Milwaukee Athletics
    Sep 2022 - May 2026. Twenty to forty hours a week of
    training and competition alongside a full course load,
    for four seasons.
  Aquatics staff, IMG Academy, Bradenton
    Jun - Aug 2026. Supervised swimmers and kept the pool
    areas safe for student athletes and campers.
  Preloader, UPS, Elm Grove
    2023 - 2025. Loaded packages onto delivery trucks in
    route order, during the school year, around classes
    and Division I training.

(Read-only. The version with the formatting is the resume.)

Hi from the basement - Message

Media Player - @EmeryReszka

@EmeryReszka on YouTubeClick to open the channel

Recycle Bin

Name	Original location	Date deleted	Type
vaporwave.css	C:\Portfolio\v1	9/27/2026	Cascading Style Sheet
neon_grid_scroll.gif	C:\Portfolio\v1	9/27/2026	GIF Image
Press Start 2P.ttf	C:\Portfolio\v1\fonts	9/27/2026	TrueType Font
titlebar_shimmer.ani	C:\Portfolio\v1	9/27/2026	Animated Cursor
emoji_icons.ico	C:\Portfolio\v1\icons	9/27/2026	Icon
hero_tagline.txt	C:\Portfolio\v1	9/27/2026	Text Document ("From code to concept, strategy to execution")

Welcome

Welcome to The Basement

The old computer where I keep my projects.

Everything on this desktop works.

Double-click an icon (tap, on a phone), drag windows around, or use the Start button.

Internet Explorer has a site for each of my two games, the way game sites looked in 2000. The green buttons are real. The flashing ones are not.
My Computer says who I am. skills.txt lists what I use.
Outlook Express writes me an e-mail. Media Player plays my YouTube channel.

Looking for the résumé or my software projects? The résumé is on the desktop, and the software lives on the recruiter view.

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The Basement Emery Reszka · Second Edition