Small games, big ideas, and classic cartoons
Mon September 08, 2025
This issue was written and edited by Ben Gillbanks. Ben is a Web Developer with over 20 years experience of building things online.
I hope this finds you well, it’s time for another Ninja Sparks newsletter!
I have spent the last couple of weeks working on my beep8 game making app. It’s a map editor that allows you to create simple little adventure games, and it’s getting close to a version 1 release! I’m really looking forward to getting the game making element ready so that other people can easily make games with it.
The first version will allow you to make small games like Key Kwest and then share them with your friends and family. Once I have this working and released, I plan to add all sorts of extra features, non-player-characters (NPCs) to talk to and enemies are top priorities. Combat and an in-game shop to use your currency on. Eventually you will be able to make your own little adventure games really easily.
I’ve also had the bright idea to make a (very ‘simple’) JavaScript 3D engine for beep8. I’ve been researching, but my math skills are poor, so we’ll see how far it goes.
Besides beep8 I have also been working on the comic I mentioned previously. I did wonder if it would be one of those things that I say I am going to do, spend ages planning, and then don’t actually finish. Photographing and arranging my thumbnails on the iPad, and now tidying them up, makes it feel like it might actually happen. You can see a photo of my iPad with the page layouts on BlueSky.
Now that I can see all the pages laid out, I can see it will take longer than I first thought - but I think it might actually happen and I’m excited to make a real thing. I spend a lot of time on the computer and most things I make are digital so having a physical product would be really cool.
This issue is a bit different to normal, it’s videos all the way down, and all of them have a creative angle that I find inspirational.
Denver Jackson video
Denver Jackson is a one-person animation machine. He creates all of his animations by hand, and is now publishing his first movie. Since starting in the animation industry he has made a number of short films and recently finished an entire movie. It’s a bit of a stretch saying he does everything himself. He has a small team of freelancers who work with him on 3d modelling, music, rigging (applying a skeleton to the 3d models) and other technical things, but he storyboards and animates everything himself, and it’s amazing. The video I have embedded is the trailer for his feature film: The Worlds Divide. If you want to watch the whole thing it will be online for 15 days. There’s a ‘pay what you want’ online screening that you can pre-order now and watch from September 16th. I will be watching it then!
Denver is on Bluesky and Instagram where he shares behind-the-scenes and in-progress footage.
A Trip to the Moon - the 1902 Science Fiction Film by Georges Méliès
This is possibly the first science fiction film ever made. It’s also got amazing special effects and is a testament to the creativity of the storytellers of the time. When you compare it to modern films, the special effects are obviously not as good, but when you consider that they didn’t have computers of any sort, and all the special effects were either done for real, with camera tricks, or by directly painting on the film - I think these are astonishing. If you like this sort of thing then it might be worth watching the film Hugo. Hugo is a story about a boy who lives in a train station, but through various twists and turns he ends up meeting Georges Méliès, the man responsible for A Trip to the Moon. I loved the film and now I feel like I should watch it again.
OK Go
OK Go are a band that are probably better known for their elaborate music videos than the music itself. This is their latest film and it was made live with the open source 3d app Blender. The video was made with the work of Lucas Zanotto and Will Anderson. It’s very clever, the way they do face tracking, and match the animation to the music (presumably using code/ geometry nodes). The Blender files are all available on the Blender website so if you want to dive into it you can, but if not you can just enjoy the colourful chaos. Make sure to watch to the end for a small amount of behind the scenes content. There are also a bunch of shorts with some behind the scenes stuff too (1, 2, 3, 4).
TV Classics
There are probably other companies that do this but I have recently found out that both Warner Bros and ITV (from the UK) have put a lot of their classic content onto Youtube for free. I don’t know if these videos are region locked but I checked on a VPN and they all seem accessible.
The ITV shows include Thunderbirds, Stingray, and The Prisoner. Terrahawks - another Gerry Anderson series, is currently being added. There are other shows but these are probably the most international. Thunderbirds and Stingray made up a large part of the TV from my childhood so it’s great seeing some of these shows again.
Warner Bros on the other hand have got an archives channel full of clips from their old content. They’ve recently been uploading groups of entire Tom and Jerry episodes episodes in hour-long bundles! So if you enjoy the old cartoons then this might be one for you.