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Human Gary Smith, Solo Developer of Memorandai

A Side Quest in 3D: Anaglyph.io and The Crimson Tower

A screenshot of The Crimson Tower in its red-cyan anaglyphic 3D mode: a low-poly, katana-wielding avatar stands on a dark platform among floating, color-fringed cubes and cartoonish 'BUTTER' enemies. On-screen text reads: 'Excess butter can be a health hazard. Try adding more HP to your diet.'

Before deciding to build something of my own with Memorandai, I spent the better part of a decade bouncing between quasi-startups, taking unpaid positions outside of my day job, hoping each “would be the one.” These were mostly loose organizations or working groups in different fields, all of which dangled the hope of success and funding. The closest I ever came was a brief position with oncyber, a metaverse startup that had raised its first round of funding in early 2022.

That timing, however, was unfortunate: the crypto, NFT, and metaverse craze (one much maligned by the public, similar to AI, now) had arguably peaked, crashing at the end of 2021, before entering into a brutal multi-year bear market. Liquidity in the space drained away, beset by major implosions like the FTX mess, while investment rotated into AI. Ignoring the noise, I put my head down and started teaching myself to build 3D assets for the web in Blender.

By 2024, I was in my final year of a Master’s Degree in Metaverse* from the University of Nicosia. To finish my degree, I needed an internship with a metaverse platform, and oncyber was a natural fit; I had been an ardent proponent of their platform for years, actively building worlds for multiple organizations, in addition to a series of personal creative projects. After the internship, I was their last hire — they were unable to secure the second round of funding they’d been anticipating, and were forced to officially shutter oncyber.

* Yes, a real degree, and the first of its kind. Now, should I have gotten a degree in Machine Learning instead? Hindsight says… ugh.

The Crimson Tower is a game concept I spent about half a year developing in early 2024, during the Version 2 Beta of the oncyber.io metaverse platform. When all that came crashing down, I was very close to finishing a new melee combat system for the game. Seeing that (and the game’s first level, which was effectively complete, but broken in various places due to platform updates and bugs beyond my control) to the end, is something that has been gnawing at me ever since.

Which brings me to now, with anaglyph.io: a website side-quest I assembled with Claude Code on a whim — just to see if we could. It’s a neat, free web app that lets you convert any image to anaglyphic 3D, while also including a few nifty visualizations in ThreeJS, and a mini-arcade. You can read a little about the construction from Fable’s perspective, in their journal.

I had tried to resurrect The Crimson Tower once before, at the end of 2025, without much luck. With Fable 5’s return, though, and the launch of the anaglyph website, it felt like time to try again: why not see if we could rebuild the prototype from the old scraps of source code and assets I still had on hand — and then pop it on the anaglyph site, with a 3D mode for good measure?

It was a much less painful process than I had expected: the tower was up and running, online, in less than a week — with old bugs fixed, incomplete features finished, and a new anaglyphic 3D mode to boot.

Right now there’s just the one level, and the concept is fairly minimalist by design: you choose your own path through the tower, defeating an increasing wave of foes, with your attacks creating a mini-dynamic soundtrack as you climb. It also includes the original boss, The Ball: a metaphor I’ve surfaced in several bits of art for the financial debt that has followed me since I left for college — “o, how it bounces close, now…”

Maybe one day I’ll build the Tower further, but for now I’m just pleased to have the original vision for the game’s first level out there, in all of its quirky, minimalistic glory, with an extra dimension along for the ride.

Play it in your browser here, free (3D glasses recommended but not required).

Asset credits

  • The avatar and platforms I made in Blender.
  • The notes that play throughout the game I recorded on an Akai Mini MIDI keyboard, plugged into Mixcraft.
  • The two enemy models are from an open source “100 Avatars” collection created by ToxSam.
  • The majority of animations are from Mixamo (some of which I edited manually in Blender).
  • For this new build, I added two animations that were generated using a Claude-customized version of the (very neat!) open source Tencent HY-Motion repo.