PROJECTS

Things I've designed and built outside of client work.

sound-basics.courseLIVE

SOUND BASICS

A self-led, interactive course on how sound is recorded, mixed, and distributed, built as a sample of my instructional design work. About 32 minutes, no audio background needed.

>Designed from a written outline with a learning objective behind every screen, and a scored assessment that sends learners back to the lesson they missed.
>Hands-on demos in place of slides: a waveform viewer, a gain-staging knob, a sample rate and bit depth converter, a mini DAW to record into, and a mixer.
>Every sound is also shown on screen, so it works without audio, with a keyboard, and on a phone.

[take the course][open the cheat sheet][read the design document][see a sample sop]

reelbutler.appIN DEVELOPMENT

REELBUTLER

A native macOS app that cleans up and organizes a movie and TV library. Drop in a folder of downloads and it figures out what each file actually is.

>Matches files against TMDB and TheTVDB, then renames and sorts them into a Jellyfin, Plex, and Kodi friendly structure.
>When a filename is ambiguous it shows the candidates ranked by confidence and asks, instead of guessing wrong.
>A full metadata editor with per-file locks, so a later scrape never overwrites your fixes.
>Watch-folder mode organizes new downloads automatically.

[read the announcement]

kbamp.exeLIVE

KBAMP

The Winamp-style player on this site's music page, built from scratch with the Web Audio API.

>Music keeps playing as you move around the site, with a mini-player on every page.
>Ten visualizers, including an oscilloscope, spectrogram, LED and VU meters, and a vectorscope, with calibrated levels so what you see means something.
>A seek bar rebuilt from the ground up to scrub silently and resume exactly where you drop the marker.

[open the player][read how it was built]

andromeda.exeLIVE (HIDDEN)

ANDROMEDA

A full arcade shooter hidden in this site, built as a hands-on gamification case study.

>Wave-based difficulty, a combo multiplier, three stacking power-ups, and a boss fight every tenth wave.
>Playable with a keyboard on desktop or an on-screen D-pad on mobile, with a shared leaderboard.
>Playtested and tuned for fair difficulty, not just hard difficulty, which is the same line a good training exercise has to walk.

[read the write-up]

kylepbartz.comLIVE

THIS SITE

A portfolio styled as a retro terminal, designed and built to be fun without getting in the way of the content.

>A real command line (press / anywhere) with a virtual file system and manual pages.
>Nine color palettes in light and dark, plus an accessibility mode with high contrast.
>Audio, visualizers, and effects written by hand, with very few outside dependencies.

[accessibility statement][credits and rights]