Cash Hilstad

Indie game developer, self-published author, musician, 3d modeler, pixel artist, D&D Dungeon Master, and more.



Hi! I'm Cash Hilstad, a computer science undergraduate with a passion for learning and evoking curiosity. I taught myself programming because I was curious, and I fell in love with it. Now, I try to use that skill to give others room to be curious and fall in love with the unknown through the games and books I make.

Tome Arcana


Tome Arcana is a D&D spellbook app which I published to Google Play. I developed it after I noticed a recurring issue in my D&D games: every time someone needed to look up what a spell does, it took a least a minute to get the information we needed. So, I developed Tome Arcana with the goal of providing quick, easy, and straightforward access to a wide array of D&D spells and their descriptions. Tome Arcana remains in use amongst me and my friends, and has become a staple of our D&D games at home.
Made with Godot.

Cobot Enforcer


Cobot Enforcer is a discord bot that provides real-time defense in servers against common scam links found on discord. I grew fed up after seeing countless friends fall for "free nitro" scams, so I developed Cobot as a solution. Cobot has been actively serving numerous servers for about three years since it was first launched. It is hosted on the cloud via Replit.
Made with Python. Hosted on Replit.

Hall Monitor


Hall Monitor is one of my favorite games that I've made. It's a horror game in which you play as a school's Hall Monitor, watching cameras and sorting hall passes. Hall passes are procedurally generated, and correctly sorting one yields a monetary reward. At the end of each night, the player has to have enough money to pay rent. There's multiple nights, as well as a second game mode, in which you monitor the gym and cafeteria.
Made in Godot.

ROOBEER


ROOBEER is an esoteric programming language which uses Python to interpret code written in it. ROOBEER is capable of basic arithmetic, boolean logic, loops, and more. On the Github repository, I have documentation provided, as well as a sample ROOBEER program which calculates the Fibonacci sequence. The code from that is pictured above.
Made with Python.

The Fish Are Hungry


The Fish Are Hungry was my first submission to a game jam. I entered Trijam, the three hour game jam, with the theme "You are the prey". We had as much time as we wanted to prepare, but could only actually produce it in the span of three hours. I carefully planned the game out, and made good use of object oriented programming to really make every bit of code as efficient as possible. I was able to design and implement 13 different "fish" with unique features into the game, alongside a main menu, audio, and more. This game taught me the importance of really planning out a project before writing any code.
Made in Godot for Trijam #236.

Sharks N' Minnows


Sharks N' Minnows is my first working multiplayer game! After finishing it, I had a newfound respect for multiplayer game developers. Even a really basic multiplayer game can be pretty complicated to setup, but it's also really rewarding. It was amazing to be able to actually play a game I made with my friends.
Made in Godot.

I Made This Game in a Day


I Made This Game in a Day is a game that I, not to be too obvious, made in a day. Really, it was more around five hours, including programming, designing, and making art. I wanted to challenge myself to make a finished product as quickly as I could. Overall, this project was a wonderful learning experience and proved valuable later on when I entered my first gamejam.
Made in Godot.

Karamon


Karamon is inspired by Pokemon, and it was my first real delve into an RPG game. I learned alot about reusability in this project, and made my systems as efficient as possible so that I could develop new content easily. From what I learned in this project, I was able to code a Pokemon clone in Java, which my AP CompSci class used as a final project.
Made in Godot.

Second Coming


Second Coming is a 3D first person shooter, the first one I ever made. Learning 3D was difficult, but I found it very rewarding. Once I really learned and mastered tools like Blender, I felt like I had so many possibilities with it. The game features a progression system, weapon loadouts, a settings menu, and many differing enemies with unique controllers.
Made in Godot.

Baby Rampage


Baby Rampage was the second big game I made, loosely inspired by the Binding of Issac. It was a good learning experience for building enemy AI, mastering UI, and procedural generation. My favorite part of the game is probably the procedural weapon generation, which was a very interesting problem to tackle. In short, I had to design a system that would randomly create weapons just slightly above the player's current power level. This ensured that they had a consistent scaling to their power, which leads to a very solid sense of progression.
Made in Godot.

Super Platformer Man


Super Platformer Man was the first game I really made myself. I didn't follow any tutorials - it was all my work. Looking back at it, I can really see how far I've come. Many of the problems and issues I had when developing it are no longer issues for me today, and I know how to overcome them in my current projects. Super Platformer Man is a platformer game with speedrunning based mechanics. After its release, I published a second update to the game, adding four new levels with unique and new mechanics to it.
Made in Godot.

Artificial Life 2.0


Artificial Life 2.0 is an evolution simulator coded in Python. It simulates genes in a way designed to replicate reality; every creature has a genetic sequence, from which it derives all of its traits. Artificial Life 1.0 was coded in Java, but I decided to port the project over to Python to make use of easy graphing tools.
Made with Python.

Beyond Sorting and Limits


Over the course of about half a year, I wrote Beyond Sorting and Limits, a book that I published to Amazon. Here's a quick summary from the Amazon page:

The diary of Din shows the last thoughts of a man driven mad in pursuit of understanding, and his enlightenment in the end.

There exists a library that has no end. In it lies every book - every book that contains truth, and every book that is nonsense. For All Time, Sorter has had the simple, albeit lengthy, job of sorting every book in the library. However, Sorter begins to question his own existence as Time passes on.
Made in Google Docs, published to Amazon on paperback and Kindle.

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