Summary
My name is Frank Podraza, I also go by Weekie on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and pretty much any social media I’m on. I created the Nerd Herd Network.
I make games. I developed Poke My Balls back in 2016, the CSGO Prop in 2019, I released Launch My Dog in 2021, and I am currently working on a first-person multiplayer game called Castle Wars which will tentatively release in 2025. I recently graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a bachelor’s in computer science. I am currently starting a career in software and game development.
Castle Wars (Tentative 2025)
I’ve spent the past 2 years developing prototypes of first-person games. The current prototype is under the moniker of “Castle Wars”. It is based on the Halo Reach game mode of the same name. Castle Wars is a simple networked multiplayer game where two teams fight to control the other’s castles. It will be published on Steam and is primarily a PC game (though if it finds success, expansion to other platforms is on the table).
I am running a (somewhat out of date) blog on its development here.
Notable features
- Extensive first-person character controller with many unique movement abilities
- Local and networked split-screen
- Steam integration and online multiplayer
- Lobbies for collecting players, setting up the game, and assigning teams
- Auto-generating settings menus
- Client-side predictive, server-authenticated movement to prevent cheating
Screenshot Gallery
Launch My Dog (2021)
This project has been released and has an official landing page.
Launch My Dog is a physics-based puzzle game where you launch a hot dog into a bun, but I put a bunch of obstacles in the way. I wanted to release this game back in 2018, but it wasn’t up to my standards, it wasn’t fun or polished enough to release. The issues were with its core mechanic of launching. I restarted it in early 2020 and slowly worked on it until it was complete. There’s some fun programming in here like projectile trajectory prediction, even through different mediums, and even portals. Launch My Dog was released on July 10th, 2021. It is available on both the iOS App Store and Google Play.
Screenshot Gallery
Poke My Balls (2016)
This project has been released and has an official landing page.
Poke My Balls started as a project called Tap2Kill. It’s a simple game where different colored balls fall and you have to tap all of one color, but none of the other colors. My Father came up with the name one day and it stuck (for better or for worse). I used this project as a way to consolidate my programming abilities and dive into the Unity engine. I have come back to it over the years to implement concepts I have learned in university, and on my own. Most recently, I used a class/subclass structure and polymorphism to make the game modes load as if they were game cartridges being put into a game console. There is one system that handles loading, and storing data (The “console”), and another that handles all the behaviors of the game (The “cartridge”). Poke My Balls was released in August of 2016, and had its 2.0 update in the Summer of 2018.
Screenshot Gallery
CSGO Prop (2019)
I wanted a way to play Counter-Strike in real life with my friends. I decided to build a Raspberry Pi-powered box with a touchscreen and speakers that would act as the C4 from the game. I wrote the entire project in Python using the Pygame library. I had wanted to learn Python and this was an excellent outlet to do so. There is the defuse game mode from Counter-Strike, as well as King-of-the-Hill and Secure Area from Rainbow Six: Siege.