Meet teacher behind new indie game “Abstractory”

Imagine looking for some new indie games to play, maybe browsing through Github or Godot, only to find out someone at our own school, a teacher in fact, has been working on a title of their own.

That someone would be Mander Kraut, former CVHS student and alumni of both Harvey Mudd College and Carnegie Mellon University, but also one of our physics teachers and our AP Computer Science teacher who’s been teaching here for seven years.

For those who have taken his class on computer science, you may have seen some of his coding projects that he has shared as examples to showcase concepts such as machine learning or Monte Carlo methods to name a few.

“I like to do a little project around the same time as AP Computer Science is doing a project just to be like, ‘here’s a thing that I’m working on,’” said Kraut. “It’s also kind of fun to just try things out and see what I can do.”

In total, Kraut has created dozens of projects, ranging from methods to solve a mathematical question to mini replicas of small games like “Baba Is You” and “Minesweeper.” As a result, the average time spent working also varies from a few hours on the small scale programs to up to 15-20 hours minimum on larger works such as the games.

And while these projects help as coding exercises and practice, mainly they were just things Kraut was interested in experimenting with, stating “It’s less ‘I’m actively exercising and practicing my skills’ and more of just like, ‘I want to see if I can do this.’” 

One such interest came around 2023 where a trend popped up of developers adapting various game genres into the roguelike genre. Basically, it was to implement role playing game elements such as procedurally generated levels and permadeath into genres that typically don’t feature such mechanics. 

“I’ve noticed a bunch of things have been turned into roguelikes” observed Kraut. “What hasn’t been turned into a roguelike? Is there a niche where there is nothing?” 

And in fact there was one genre that had yet to receive its adaptation into a roguelike—the puzzle factory genre. It was this unfulfilled niche Kraut noticed that became the initial impulse for his largest project—“Abstractory,” a simple roguelike puzzle factory game.

Alongside the help of a close friend, the two have been working on and off the project since 2023, Kraut himself putting an estimated 100-200 hours total as the game’s main coder while said friend worked on assets. 

The game runs on the Godot game engine which, prior to developing “Abstractory,” Kraut had no experience in, meaning Kraut had to learn a new coding language which was no easy task.

“When trying to figure out how to do something, I’m like ‘How can you do this in Godot?’” explained Kraut. “It’s like going to forums and things for the general ideas and then the documentation for specifically learning how to use it”

Currently, “Abstractory” is still in its infancy but playable with a handful of short puzzles. Maybe sometime in the near future when you refresh a page on Github, Godot, or even Steam, you may just find a game made here in CVHS.