solxmn.me

Easter egg done!

I made another little thing for my site: a small top-down scene with a character, a tree, some particles, and a short interaction.
I’m not going to spoil what actually happens in the scene. If you want to see that part, you’ll have to find it yourself.

What it is

It’s a single-page top-down scene made with vanilla JS and CSS. You can walk around, interact with things, and eventually get sent somewhere else.

There’s also some collision, particles, animations, and a few other small details that make it feel a little less like a static webpage.

Some problems I ran into

One of the first problems was correctly setting the tree’s size. I had multiple things affecting its scale at once, which resulted in it being way bigger than it was supposed to be. Once I figured out what was actually controlling its size, it was a pretty easy fix.

The collision was another one. The hitboxes didn’t always line up with what was actually on screen, so I ended up making a small hitbox editor to make placing them much easier. It can also save and export the hitbox data, which made testing things a lot less painful.

I also had to figure out how to keep the world consistent when resizing the browser. This ended up being one of the more annoying parts, since quite a few things depended on the screen size. Getting the background, movement, and collision to all agree took a few attempts.

There were also the usual animation problems. The character could keep walking against a wall, or quickly tapping a key could make the animation look weird, just your average game engine errors. Nothing particularly complicated, but definitely the kind of stuff you don’t notice until you actually start playing it.

Then there was the tree layering.

I wanted the character to be able to walk behind the tree while still appearing in front of the leaves, which took a surprisingly long time to get looking right. I ended up doing some slightly weird CSS/image layering instead of making completely separate sprites for everything.

And, of course, there were a bunch of tiny mistakes along the way. Typos, duplicated code, things being in the wrong layer, and a few cases where something looked completely broken for no obvious reason.

Basically, normal web development.

What was easier than expected

Once the basic systems were working, adding smaller things became pretty easy.

The particle effects were simple to tweak, rectangular hitboxes were straightforward to add, and the dialogue UI was mostly just a matter of adjusting some CSS until it looked right.

What was harder than expected

The biggest surprise was how many things depended on the screen size.

Something that sounds as simple as making the world stay the same size ended up affecting a lot more than I expected.

There was also a lot more manual work involved than I originally thought, especially when preparing some of the visual assets and getting the different layers of the tree to work together.

A few things I left as they are

The world is based on the screen size when it’s first loaded, so it isn’t necessarily identical on every device and may break on some (sorry!).

For something this small, I don’t really mind. It’s meant to be a little hidden scene on my website, not a full game.

There’s also still a debug option for the hitboxes in the code. It’s useful when I’m working on the scene, so I kept it around.

And yes, this is an easter egg.

You’ll have to find it yourself.

The Story Behind solxmn.me

solxmn.me started long before the domain itself existed.

The very first version of my website was created on an .is-a.dev subdomain on October 8, 2025. At the time, I was still figuring out how I wanted the site to look and how I wanted to approach web development.

Initially, I used AI to help create a few different templates, then experimented with modifying the ones I liked most. Eventually, though, I stopped relying on templates and started actually learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript myself. I also took inspiration from websites and services like Linktree and other personal websites I came across, while gradually developing my own style.

A few months later, I applied for the GitHub Student Developer Pack. On July 15, 2026, I used it to claim my .me domain through Namecheap for one year. That was the point where the project started feeling much more like a real personal website rather than an experiment.

For the redesign, I took a different approach. Before writing the code, I designed the entire website in Photoshop. I wanted to have a clear idea of the layout and the final concept before I started implementing it. Having the whole design in front of me made it much easier to turn the idea into an actual website.

Once I had the motivation to work on it, I went all in. I spent around four to five hours a day working on the redesign, tweaking details, fixing things that bothered me, and gradually turning the original concept into something I was genuinely proud of.

After the main redesign was finished, I started adding more personal touches and Easter eggs. Those small details became one of my favorite parts of the project because they made the site feel less like a generic portfolio and more like something that actually belonged to me.

Despite using AI during the early stages of the project, I barely used it in the versions that were actually deployed. I only used it once or twice, mainly for debugging and for writing GitHub push descriptions. Most of the final website was built by me, through everything I learned while working on it, obviously taking much inspiration from Toby Fox and Temmie Chang’s works.

This (and probably the final) version is made up of 2 main pages:
A more “professional” index page, which has most of my socials, and some brief introductions, my skills, hobbies and whatnot;
The redesign, the actual CORE ;) of the website, but I’m not going to tell you how to get to it or what’s in it :P, it’s up to you to figure out what else is there.

Looking back, the project has been a really fun experience. It started as a simple personal website, but along the way it became a way for me to learn web development, experiment with design, and build something that I could genuinely call my own.

I don’t think this will be the last project like this, either. Building this site made me want to create more things from scratch, and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what I end up making next.