Walking through City High, students can be found battling for the high score on Samurai Slasher, a relatively new platform game produced completely from scratch by Hal Seamans ‘23.

“I haven’t made any video games to sell for a profit or anything, I just make what I want when I want to,” Seamans said. 

Coding is the language of computers; the process of transforming human instructions into virtual embodiment. That’s exactly what Seamans manages to accomplish; in the form of video games.

“Some find it fun to play video games in their free time; I enjoy programming them, it’s satisfying to solve problems and see tangible results,” said Seamans. 

Seamans started small, at first using software like Scratch, but as his coding skills surpassed what Scratch could offer, he moved on to more powerful programming using Java. Beginning his coding journey in 6th grade, he produced his first video game in 8th grade. Being self-taught in the art, he has the freedom of programming anything he wants to.

In his free time, Seamans codes new projects, and uploads them to his website.

 “I run the site by myself. If I have something I want to make, I’ll whip up a prototype in a few hours and throw it on the website… It’s really helpful having friends to bounce gameplay ideas off of and to test the gameplay itself”

Seamans is currently working on coding projects for new video games.

“I’ve always wanted to make a metroidvania, so I’ve been playing around with different game concepts. It’s the stuff other than programming that I tend to struggle with, like art, gameplay, and music.”