Anthony Ellis

Software engineer · Las Vegas

I'm a Solo Indie Game Dev.

For the last ten years that's meant Solvane: The Iron Reach, a space game in GameMaker. But additionally, it's also included a few other projects, a procedural galaxy, a city that jams when you plan it badly, and an aquarium simulation using boids. I taught myself all of it, starting from a tutorial about how to make a square move.

See the projects Read the write-ups Email me

Everything on this page runs in your browser. No signup, no upload, no account, nothing sent anywhere. The three simulations below start when you click them and stop when you close the tab.

Selected work

07 projects
In development · since 2016 Solvane: The Iron Reach title card — the game's name in pixel-art type over a starfield, with a blue banded ice planet at lower right.

GameMaker · GML · Procedural generation

Solvane: The Iron Reach

Star Trek ran almost permanently in the house I grew up in, and for most of my childhood I wanted to be an astronaut. Building the galaxy myself turned out to be the version of that I could reach. Started in 2016: an infinite procedurally generated galaxy you mine, build factories in, defend, and fly through in a ship you designed. Now on Steam, aiming at 2027.

  • GameMaker Studio
  • GML
  • Chunked world streaming
  • Shaders
  • 9 years of evenings
Read the write-up Wishlist on Steam

Things you can run

Built over about a month of evenings in mid-2026. Each one has its own page, where it runs full width with the notes underneath.
A spiral galaxy of 160,000 stars rendered as a glowing point cloud. Procedural generation · WebGL Procedural Galaxy Generator Type a seed and get a galaxy. Type it on another machine and get the same one, down to the mountains on a particular planet, because nothing is stored. Open it A road network simulation with vehicles queueing at signalised junctions. Agent simulation · Graphs Arterial Draw a road network and watch it jam. Every vehicle picks its own route, so congestion is something the system does rather than something I scripted. Open it Shoals of fish moving as a flock above a reef of cellular-automata coral. Flocking · Cellular automata Aquarium Sandbox Four thousand fish, each following three rules and none following a leader. The reef underneath them grows by cellular automaton. Open it

Live data

Public feeds fetched by your browser and drawn to canvas by hand — no chart library, and no server of mine in the middle. Nothing loads here until you open one.
A dark dashboard showing solar wind speed, magnetic field and K index charts. NOAA SWPC · Canvas Space Weather Monitor Solar wind, the interplanetary magnetic field and the planetary K index, live from NOAA. It ends by answering whether the aurora is visible from Las Vegas, which it almost never is. Open it Charts of Las Vegas electricity demand against a day-ahead forecast and the daily temperature curve. EIA · Open-Meteo · Canvas Heat and Load What Las Vegas is drawing from the grid, what Nevada Power predicted yesterday it would draw, and the desert temperature that decides both. Open it A polar plot of recent earthquakes arranged by distance and bearing from Las Vegas. USGS · Canvas The Ground Under Las Vegas Every earthquake recorded worldwide in the last day, plotted by how far it was from here and which way, on rings out to 800 km. Open it

How I got here

2014 → now

I've never had a job that involved writing code. The top of this line is how I paid rent; the bottom is what I was actually doing with my evenings. They only started converging recently.

Work Self-taught
Del Sol High School

Graduated

Las Vegas. No plan beyond finding work.

Jun 2014
Great Buns Bakery

Sanitation

First job. More factory than bakery: pallets of trash, scraping dough off concrete, power-washing baking trays.

Summer 2014

Opened GameMaker

A Facebook quiz asked whether I'd ever made a Zelda fangame. That question stuck. First search: "how do I move player in GameMaker Studio". First result that worked: a platformer built with Zelda 2 sprites.

2015

A snake game in Notepad

Wrote it in Python, in a text editor, to find out whether what I'd learned transferred to another language. It did.

2016

Started Solvane

I'd grown up with Star Trek on in the background and spent most of my childhood wanting to be an astronaut. Building a galaxy in GameMaker was the version of that I could start on a weekend. The oldest build I still have is dated 18 November 2016; nine years later I'm still finding out how big the idea was.

Oct 2016

First real PC

A prebuilt with a GTX 1080, bought with bakery money after a Lenovo laptop and a machine from Fry's with a Radeon older than the laptop. Plugged the HDMI into the motherboard and sat looking at a black screen.

Raising Cane's

Crew trainer

Trained new hires on the register during peak.

Dec 2017 – Dec 2018
Alorica

Customer service rep

Four and a half years of high-volume calls and email. Learned to find a root cause instead of treating a symptom, which turned out to transfer.

Jan 2019 – Jun 2023

Dozens of GameMaker projects

A 2D take on Hyrule Warriors, a Zelda 2 clone, a top-down spellcasting game, an Agar.io-style life simulation. Most unfinished, all of them teaching something.

Fasteners, Inc. / Southwestern Supply

Customer service rep

Technical product support in SAP and NetSuite. Matching customers to the right part from a spec sheet.

Jul 2023 – Dec 2024
SunSource Energy

Solar appointment setter

Cold calling, three to five qualified appointments a day. The company folded in July.

Jan – Jul 2025

Between jobs

Six months of applications. I stopped waiting for the market to hand me something and started deciding what I wanted to be applying for.

Jul 2025 – Jan 2026
Zoox

Ride operations

Applied in September, heard nothing, followed up on a whim in December, interviewed in January. Now I monitor and remotely operate driverless vehicles in live service, run test missions on pre-release features and file the reports engineering works from.

Jan 2026 →

Deciding to be deliberate

First time I've treated any of this as a career rather than a hobby that happens next to one.

Aug 2026

Three demos and a domain

Bought anthonyellis.dev and built the galaxy, the traffic sim and the aquarium so there'd be something to point at. Same feeling as downloading GameMaker: a thing I'd assumed was out of reach, until I looked at it properly.

Drag or scroll sideways to move through it →

Write-ups

07 pieces

Each project has a longer piece behind it about how it actually works and what went wrong on the way. These are the parts a screenshot can't show.

Nine years on one game

A chunk system written three times, what nine months away does to a codebase, and why I kept coming back.

 Solvane

A quarter of a million stars in one draw call

Seed chains, sub-pixel dimming in a vertex shader, and a worker that has to agree with the main thread bit for bit.

 Galaxy · 1,500 words

Making a city jam on purpose

IDM car-following, MOBIL lane changes, A* over lane space, and junctions that arbitrate by reservation.

 Arterial · 1,600 words

The endpoints everyone links to don't work

A CORS header that isn't there, a feed carrying three spacecraft at once, and why a loud failure beats a plausible one.

 Space weather

A lag is not a subtraction

A keyless endpoint behind a public dashboard, a national total with a paperwork seam in it, and why finding two peaks doesn't answer the question.

 Heat and Load

Leaving the map out

Why a world map answers the wrong question, haversine versus treating degrees as pixels, and saying no on a quiet day.

 Earthquakes

Three hundred fish to four thousand

The spatial hash, a structure-of-arrays pool with a free list, and why the sand scan direction alternates every row.

 Aquarium · 1,100 words

About

Anthony Ellis

I'm Anthony. I live in Las Vegas and I work at Zoox on the operations side of driverless cars, which puts me close enough to the interesting problems to want to be working on them.

Before code I drew, sculpted with clay and wrote stories, so making things was never the new part. Code just looked like math from the outside, tedious and unrewarding, until the first project came to life and turned out to be the same impulse pointed somewhere else. Now the part I care about is the layer under the thing you can see. How do you find the nearest thirty fish out of four thousand without checking all four thousand? How does a car plan a route through a road network the player is allowed to bulldoze while it's driving?

I'm not planning on a degree. I've watched too many people take on debt for a piece of paper and land in a job that would have hired them anyway. What I do instead is pick a problem I don't understand and stay on it until I do, which is how everything on this page got built.

I'm looking for entry-level or junior work in simulation, gameplay, graphics or tools, remote or here in Las Vegas. Get in touch if that's the sort of thing your team does.

What I use

Contact

Email reaches me fastest. The code for this site and the demos is on GitHub.

anthony@anthonyellis.dev github.com/AnthonyEllisDev Résumé (PDF)