Jackson Cartwright - Portfolio

WAIT.. WHAT'S FLOWLAB?

Flowlab.io is an online, web-based 2D game engine. It has its roots in educational use, but has evolved to also support professional development. Flowlab's main deal is that all programming is done in a versatile visual scripting language. My game dev journey started with this engine, but I grew to love the way its visual scripting works, and it's remained my primary game engine for the past seven years!

Flowlab runs a bi-annual game jam over two weeks called the "Flowjam", and I've managed to obtain first place twice, as well as a second, third and fourth place medal. The prize winners are among the games below.

UNIVERSAL RUMBLE
My role: UI Programming, Art & Design

Team size: 3

Made over: November 8th & 9th 2025

Made for the Spartasoft November 2025 Game Jam, Universal Rumble is a multiplayer game where you race a cargo ship away from a dangerous expanding void as asteroids and space debris get in your way.

The decision to work on this game came later in the jam. I ended up making it in about 22 hours (not counting sleep), under half of the runtime for the game jam (48 hours). I had the help of a prominent Flowlab developer, "The Brickccentric", who did the multiplayer and systems framework while I handled the other aspects of the game (and tuning the physics a couple dozen times). Flowlab's multiplayer support has some jank to it but we were still able to deliver a functional multiplayer game in under a day's time!

TIDAL REIGN!
My role: Project Management, 2D Art, Programming, Design

Team size: 5

Made over: July 2025

The 4th place winner of the Summer Flowjam 2025, Tidal Reign is a short decisions-focused colony management and politics game. You assume the role of a space freighter captain who's settled an untouched waterworld with some colonists, in the hope of building a better home. Be mindful that every decision carries weight in the interest of some groups and against the interest of others. Build a garden or an industry center, it's your choice!

Tidal Reign originally had just two people on it, but I soon realized that the amount of character art and writing would be too much to bear, so two character artists and a narrative designer were brought onto the team. With such a relatively large team size during a game jam, a chunk of my time was actually spent creating consistent Figma documentation for the team to read and contribute to. Tidal Reign was finished missing a lot of characters and features we wanted to add, but nevertheless, the game is functional and all of that pixel art was well worth it!

Development is ongoing with Tidal Reign at the moment, and we hope to finish a version full of everything we wanted in the game by the end of 2025!

PARSE-O-RHYTHM
My role: Almost everything except Audio

Team size: 5

Made over: January 2024 - Ongoing

1st place winner of the Winter Flowjam 2024. A rhythm game where you play as a little AI on the screen, controlled by the mouse, where you use left and right click to chop away errors that come down the screen. This game has also launched on Steam! You can read more about it here.

Parse-O-Rhythm is my current primary personal project, and I aim to continue working on it until all of the features we want to implement into it are in, which includes a full level editor. At 23 months of age, this is my longest running personal project, seconded to Galacdrive.

Parse-O-Rhythm's Steam launch trailer.

TINY MISSILES
My role: Everything except Audio

Team size: 2

Made over: July 2024

A local Versus game submitted to the Summer Flowjam 2024. Two players control separate space stations that orbit around each other with keys on opposite ends of the board. The goal is to build drills to collect resources, and then spend those resources to launch missiles at the opponent's base!

This game was made in the middle of an intense time during Parse-O-Rhythm's development, so we only spent two days on it instead of the two week duration of the jam. Despite this, the experience of making a locally played versus game was a good homage to pay to local versus flash games that both Logan and I, the makers of this game, grew up with.

NEWER GAME
My role: Everything (sort of)

Team size: 1

Made over: November 2023

Typically, everyone's first game on Flowlab is a low-quality platformer with the default sprites provided by the engine. So for this game, I decided to reimagine the "user's first platformer" with Newer Game, a spin on "New Game", the default name for a game on Flowlab. Compared to the user's first platformer, this game features excessively juiced and animated sprites for everything, a layered background, an ending screen, original UI systems and some unique mechanics.

This was made for an introductory game development course at Michigan State University after I asked the professor if I could make the 2D platforming project in Flowlab. He agreed, and after roughly a month of work, this game was complete! It comes with three distinguished levels and is made up of almost entirely default artwork, although some pieces were upscaled in Aseprite to keep the pixel sizes consistent.

MISTY HOLLOW
My role: UI Art

Team size: 8

Made over: October 2023

A collaboration between many well known Flowlab game developers, this timed Halloween game has you racing around collecting candy and doing simple timing challenges at houses to beat others in the global leaderboard. It also has fully functioning multiplayer.

I was a bit busy during my time in this project, so I contributed UI art to the project and also did a tiny bit of help with design. We finished up the game around a week after Halloween (rip), but the experience of playing a multiplayer game like this was worth it.

For October 2024, the game was massively updated and featured many new systems, however I was absent from the development at this time (I didn't want to take on too much at once).

ENVOY
My role: Everything except Audio

Team size: 2

Made over: July 2023

The 3rd place winner for the Summer Flowjam 2023. Deliver crystals to a monolith as fast as you can, evading increasingly aggressive locals in the process.

For this project, I challenged myself with taking the concepts from "Smashy Road Wanted 2" and twisting it into a sci-fi setting. I also learned a neat trick called "sprite stacking", which mimics a top-down 2.5D view in 2D space. This project is also my only project to include voice acting: "Military units, secure!"

Additionally, this game was also my first game published to Steam for free at the end of the year.

Envoy's Steam launch trailer.

GALACDRIVE
My role: Everything except Audio

Team size: 4

Made over: March 2022 - May 2023

Available on the App Store, this mobile game is a mix of asteroid dodging, boss fighting, and powerup wielding. It is the only mobile game I've worked on and was also my first project on Flowlab following my long hiatus from the engine during 2019.

This project originally was meant to be a short learning project to get me back into the "swing of things" before learning a more well known engine (I was torn between Unity and Godot at the time), however, I loved working on it and many others loved playing it, so I ended up sticking with it and eventually turned it into an entire complete mobile game. Along the way I recruited a talented friend, Logan Kinoshita, to do the music, and later others to help with music and sound effects.

This project was made at the tail end of my high school career and launched the same week I graduated, so despite the game not having everything I ever wanted, It holds a special spot in my heart. We also got interviewed by the local news about it!

THE NOVAVIS
My role: Everything except Audio

Team size: 4

Made over: January 2023

The 2nd place winner for the Winter Flowjam 2023, this game sees you pilot a prototyped space ship through an extremely bright supernova. Your goals are to take pictures of interesting landmarks to prove to the authorities that your design works. However, this game is actually secretly a horror game, and it doesn't end well to say the least.

Making a game that's unsettling proved to be extremely challenging - allowing things to get creepy in an environment that's not all that scary is very difficult to do, especially with pixel art. The game ended up not being all that spooky in the end, but the spaceship navigation system, the animated UI and all of the juice we added to it really made it a memorable project.

NOITCIDDA
My role: Everything except Audio

Team size: 2

Made over: November 2022

This game masquerades as a generic little geometric shooter, but as you play and use powerups, the powerups start to make you weaker. They begin to move towards you, and you eventually build a reliance on them to even play the game. Eventually this is no longer enough either. This game is actually a PSA game about addiction.

This project was made for a generic health class - the kind that teaches sex ed, good life habits and a bunch of other miscellaneous things. We were tasked to make a project about one of the societal issues we had as options, and I had the free time to do it, so I decided to make this short little project. I made it along with Riley Creger, an old online friend who also made Flowlab games and had an interest in music, so he ended up doing the game's soundtrack.

UNIVERSAL CRUMBLE
My role: Everything

Team size: 1

Made over: July-August 2022

1st place winner of the Summer Flowjam 2022. A physics based spaceflight game where you must use the WASD keys to guide a space probe to the end of five increasingly difficult and challenging levels, all the while a void of death chases you from behind towards the galactic center. You also learn to utilize a laser gun and other abilities as you progress.

This game was my first time entering into the bi-annual Flowjam game jam event, of which lasts two weeks. I worked very hard on it, but had no expectation that it would win. It ended up winning against the second placer by a hair, but this was one of the most key events that led me down the path to pursue game development. For perhaps the first time in my entire life, I realized I was exceptional - not average - at something. Galacdrive's development had already started, but this success solidified not only my love for game development, but also love for the Flowlab game engine and its wonderful community.

The game would go on to receive relatively minor updates, getting some UI improvements, new features and some music changes!

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