Seizmojigger: The Legend Begins

I was in 5th grade when I played my first game of Milton Bradley’s classic Battleship board game with some classmates during some downtime at school. It was mid, but interesting. I was a gifted kid, I preferred more complex stuff, but I could immediately tell there was some psychological element to the strategy for a simple game, and there were really only so many moves and choices you could make, so the “decision space” was small. I intuited that this was a game I could easily master with some practice, considerably easier than chess.

One day my mom took me out on some errands, shopping at Staples or something, and I saw a cheap “shareware” version of Battleship on the shelf. Just a 5″ floppy disk with a dot-matrix typed label in a paper sleeve, no box, no instructions. But it said “BATTLESHIP” and that was all I needed to know, and I think it was like $5 bucks. It probably wasn’t made by Milton Bradley.

I took it home and installed it on the IBM 386, it ran in DOS. This picture isn’t the exact version I had, mine was actually shittier. No graphical boats, and I think it was only white or red text on a blue background - those beveled gray buttons are AWFULLY fancy compared to what I had! My game had none of that, but it worked, and I could play single player against the AI. Which was a bitch, by the way. It used this really boring strategy, but it always seemed to beat me! Didn’t matter where I put my ships either, I swore it was cheating. But when I figured out why it was taking that particular tack, I realized it was a pretty good one. If I was going to use it against a human opponent, I would have to be more slick about how I applied it so it couldn’t be noticed, reverse engineered, predicted and then countered... I also discovered this game had a “make it, take it” mode, where you could keep firing until you got a miss. I thought that was pretty cool, until the AI started REAMING me with it, so I said yeah, pass on that one.

Needless to say, once Street Fighter II came out, I pretty much forgot about Battleship.

The first two Tremors movies came out and I didn’t even notice, honestly. Not a horror or monster movie guy. But when I was in late high school, my little brother and his best friend next door were playing some PlayStation game with me, and they kept quoting Tremors 2. It sounded kinda hilarious, but I had no idea what they were talking about. My neighbor had it on VHS, he said we should watch it (again, and again) that weekend, so I said sure. I gotta admit, it was pretty hilarious, he converted me. I went back and rented the first Tremors to see where the sequel had come from, and was surprised that it was a) making some earnest efforts at being scary, as opposed to the comedy-action of part 2, and 2) not funny, nor scary, and D) had a HEAVY load of swearing! Like it just jumped out at me, how little swearing there was in 2 compared to 1. Odd. Not that it bothered me, I was raised Catholic and we swear like sailors, but it was just weird, the drop-off. Also Kevin Bacon, what happened to him? Strange realizing they sorta stepped down to making Earl the new main character, and turned up Burt to 11, ha. And shortly after I graduated, Tremors 3 came out, straight to video, so we immediately rented that and had a good time. Part of that came from mocking Earl’s departure and it becoming just “The Burt Gummer” show now. Weird trajectory, but we weren’t exactly complaining, Michael Gross was clearly the best character anyway.

In my college years was when the internet at large really embraced JavaScript, particularly “applets” they called them, which as the name implies, are web-based “mini-app(lication)s.” Yahoo!, which used to be a major search engine and social giant on the internet, had a whole games section, uncreatively titled “Yahoo! Games,” and among its many offerings was “Naval Command,” a blatant rip-off of Battleship with pretty shitty graphics (though considerably better than my old DOS version), and obviously that caught my attention. It used some sort of Elo ranking system to match players to more or less equivalent skill. I mimicked that old DOS game’s bullshit play to win strategy and absolutely dominated the leaderboards in my spare time between classes during the days. Nights were spent learning how to dominate IRL friends in Super Smash Bros. on the N64.

Around this same time, I bought a Game Boy Advance, and Advance Wars 2 was hands-down my favorite game. Also at this time, I was learning how to play Go, mostly because I was a giant weeaboo and was really into Hikaru no Go at the time. Focusing on these three games/media at the same time had a lot of synergy with each other. Go really teaches you to look at abstract concepts like “controlling space,” and not in a concrete way, but more in terms of “influence” which can later be capitalized on. Meanwhile I was still pwning noobs on Naval Command by controlling their space, lol.

But the real mental synthesis came through Advance Wars, where I was controlling space in the same way, but asymmetrically. Most interesting to me was the incredibly balanced gameplay of each character. For some of them, their default advantage was insane, while their super moves were weak, like Colin, who produced shit units, but they were cheap. What I noticed about Colin was that since his units were cheaper, his ability to control space was unparalleled. I could cramp, congest, and contain my opponents just by giving them too much shit to kill, and no room to move, particularly if I was strategic about placement, exploiting bottlenecks in movement, mismatches in targeting at all, etc. I never made great use of his supers. (I’ve read that he’s the most broken character because of his super, but it takes a lot more setup than I ever had the patience for.)

But then you had CO’s on the other end, like Sami, who was pretty mid on her default behaviors, but had INSANE supers. She gets a buff to her infantry and bazooka units, plus some extra movement points, big whoop, they’re the weakest units anyway. But then you activate her super, and she can one-shot CAPTURE an entire city, OR HQ, and it’s like WTF is that!? CRAZY good! If situational. I just felt like every character in that game was an even match against any other (even though competitive forums will stratify them into tiers — aren’t all gamers autistic in the end?), in sometimes very lopsided ways that could surprise you. I really admired this sort of game design: even matches, but not mirror images of each other.

My brother and our next door neighbor got really into inventing our own board games through college, and among many prototypes we workshopped, we considered a Battleship variant based on the Tremors movies. After all, the “seizmojigger” as Earl called it in Tremors 2 did look a lot like the Battleship board background. So I took my old physical copy of Battleship, and we butchered it into our own idea for a board game. Taking my Go, Battleship, and Advance Wars 2 strategies into account, I mapped some pretty strong and synergistic abilities onto our favorite characters from the franchise, to invent a new rule set, where the players could select a character from the movies and have an even match against another character. My instincts were pretty spot-on, it only took about 20 games to figure out where the mismatches and weak points were, and debug and tweak that stuff to get all the characters balanced.

From our normal Battleship set + 3x5″ index cards with rules, we cannibalized and rebuilt my Battleship set into the original Seizmojigger game. I disassembled the consoles, measured the cardboard backings, scanned and Photoshopped some new backings, re-printed them on new cardstock, and reassembled the consoles. Meanwhile my brother and the next door neighbor (our honorary Third Brother) used an X-Acto knife to shave off the tops of the battleships, and formed some Graboids out of clay, complete with holes for “hit” pins, baked them, then glue-gunned them to the ship bases. The trading card style character cards were seriously choice, although you couldn’t really play a mirror match since we only had one copy of each character, but you could also just as easily imagine it. I decided on using a star to represent an innate or “always on ability,” like Colin’s “units are cheaper to produce” for Burt’s “Extra Ammo,” a move I straight up stole from the old DOS game: If he ever got a hit, he would go again until he missed. I also chose a sweet little grenade icon that I drew, tilted slightly sideways, to indicate moves you had limited uses of —supers, if you will— like Earl’s Seizmojigger, a broken AF move that would straight up reveal the location of a Graboid, but he could only do it twice in a game.

Finally of course, we had to customize the box. We made a foam container for all the delicate ship—er, Graboid? SANDWORM parts. And I came up with a sweet industrial design to the outer cover using duct tape to make it look metallic, and hot glued bigass bolts to it. Of course, we had to Photoshop Kevin Bacon back into the Tremors 2 movie poster, since he was a playable character, yet notably absent from the movie. Also we had pretty much run out of ideas for what exactly would be the smallest, 2-hit worm, what Battleship calls a “Destroyer.” We decided to throw that little asshole from the first Tremors movie, Melvin, under the bus and make him the Destroyer. We were 99% sure he was Wayne from The Wonder Years, so we called him “Lil’ Wayne” for our game, and featured him eating the main characters from below on the box top, lol. Years later, especially after the Melvin character returns in Tremors 3, we realized that he was definitely not the same dude. In fact, this IMDB pic really blew our minds: Wayne and Melvin the same room. With Gary Coleman, no less! Definitely different actors, oops.

Many years later, I was a web designer, and I realized I hit a wall in my career. If I didn’t learn some real-ass programming, I was basically stuck in glorified customer service, because the world was changing with HTML5, JS ES6, CSS3, WordPress, and Web 3.0 coming around, mobile design... I was a fairly shitty front-end developer, and quickly becoming obsolete with the aging skills I had then. What’s worse, I had been married a few years and was just having my third child and ran out of bedrooms in the house. If I didn’t move up in the world, my wife was gonna divorce me and I’d be a failure as a father. So I took some online classes (at my darling wife’s behest) to teach myself basic programming, C++ and later C#. I needed to complete some sort of self-contained, fully functional project to complete the course, and I thought shit, man. Seizmojigger isn’t all that complex and the game logic and rules are all written out, playtested, balanced and everything, I just need to implement it. So for my final, that’s what I did. I basically rebuilt that shitty, shareware DOS Battleship as a newfangled, Tremors-themed, improved version from a gameplay perspective, though not much more advanced as far as ASCII art for visuals goes. You can download it if you want, it works on Windows, but the OS will give you a “ZOMG THAT’S POSSIBLY A VIRUS MAYBE” message, go ahead and dismiss that. I wish I was cool enough to code a real worm or trojan or something, great way to make money otherwise, amirite? But no, it’s just my shitty fan-fic Battleship variant, and it’s local-only, no networking, fully text based. You’d be best to install this to a laptop, reminiscent of the original board game, and just pass the hardware back and forth between you and your couch co-op opponent during gameplay.

I was really proud of that stupid thing, and yet I wasn’t satisfied. I really needed to make an online multi-player version. So GD it, new skills in hand and high on my own supply because I successfully completed ONE tiny app in a computer language I had never used before, I got big for my britches and leapt whole hog into making a PHP driven multi-player version! I knew nothing about PHP going in either, Googled my way through it. It took me months, between being a noob, having zero time on my hands for hobbies as the father of 3.5 small children, and being a development team of one... it was a long, slow, crawl. I started a Twitter to hold myself accountable, but if you look at the early posts, you can see that did jack shit for me, lol. But hey, at least I reserved the name if this ever got off the ground.

I also started considering... what if it did get off the ground, though? I mean I had some ideas for DLC characters, to make a couple bucks on the side just to pay for the hosting service, but if I did that... was Universal going to come after me? What about Hasbro?? They gobbled up every other physical game maker on the market, you KNOW they’re gonna pinch my pennies! Then again, they never took Yahoo! to the mat over Naval Command, as far as I know. I figured, let’s just rename everything and keep trucking. Rather proud of my “anonymized” characters lol. Also they look nothing like the actors, either. Promise. You know you guys, it would really help your Big Corporate Image if you could just... buy me out instead. Just saying.

It all ended up being moot anyway though. Ten years into development, the PHP language got a major update, and they changed something SUPER fundamental about the programming. It was something like the way a function handles not being given a value to process, it used to assume “null” and keep on keepin’ on, and I had coded the whole damn game assuming this was how the language would always work, until one day, like a Graboid running into solid rock, it just hit a hard stop. Servers crashed, Googling for answers was a weeks long process and I still couldn’t fix it, and I didn’t want to rebuild the whole thing line by line, I didn’t even know what I was doing in the first place! So I just let the project languish, guiltily renewing the domain name every year with zero progress being made.

I was looking for a career change in 2025, and started training up on Project Management certificates, joined a business networking group, and started trying to get a new job. That networking group had some pretty cool and creative dudes in it, some of them were really into using AI. I’d heard all about ChatGPT, fiddled with Grok here and there, but at the time I was thinking, color me unimpressed. I dunno what the fuss is about, just seems like a faster Google to me. Heck, ever since Google started automatically summarizing results at the top of your search pages, I felt like that was all ChatGPT was doing, just more interactive. A novelty toy at best. But this younger guy in the business club said Naw dog, you wanna sign up for Claude Code. Tried to convince me it was worth the $20 bucks a month. Apparently he’s made more than one game himself, specifically with Claude Code, and he’s making money off of them. Walked me through how to really leverage AI the right way and get all set up, promised me it would be just like lighting a stick of dynamite, and then WA-BAM!! 50 G’s. So I said fine, made that my New Year’s Resolution for 2026, signed up, and got off to the races on finally producing my magnum opus!!

Which is not this game, actually, ha. It’s another one that is considerably more ambitious, a full intellectual property of my own, a platform game played on a game pad to be released on Steam and then other platforms... I’ll announce it later if/when that gets ready for primetime. But around February or March, it was already stalling out waiting for artwork to be produced (by me, or maybe my son). And while I was waiting, I was just itching to do more vibe coding with Claude. It was fun, it was cool to see progress, it was a rush all season! I felt like I was being denied critical, need-to-have, development time.

And that’s when it hit me: Maybe while I’m waiting... CLAUDE can revamp my Seizmojigger code!! And OVERNIGHT he fixed it, AND the server configuration issues! I’ve been ravenously developing it all year, writing this as of the summer of 2026, explicitly trying to AVOID adding my original artwork I had, because I realized I can give it a much more consistent look if I just stick to ready-made assets, and AI-generate the rest. I removed all my raster graphics, replaced them with vector and FontAwesome glyphs, finished the basic game play, added matchmaking, hell, I even made it mobile-friendly! All the shit I wanted to do for almost 15 years now, I was getting it ALL done in the course of a season! I’m a believer now, I recommend AI to anybody! Thanks, Anthropic! (You too, FontAwesome, and Laragon for the local testing. I suppose Google too, for the searching and also the hosted fonts.) And a pre-emptive thanks to my old friend Quinton, who wrote his own image-generating AI for hobby use, and he converted the last few character portraits to 3D renderings, which I don’t have in hand at the time of this writing, but... I’m sure he’ll come through.