Work With Me — Robert Hadden Jr. · Quantum Melanin Media

The proof

The brief was a link page. I shipped a studio.

Quantum Melanin Media is my own company, which means nobody signed off on a shortcut. Everything below is verifiable by viewing source on the page you are reading.

What was here

A 540-pixel column of emoji link cards.

Every card sent the visitor off the domain — itch.io, Amazon, Gumroad
Nothing the studio made could be seen without leaving first
Three book links pointed at the wrong book; one title was never listed
No way to check a deploy — GitHub Pages has no staging

What is here now

One hand-written page that shows the work instead of naming it.

A 14-second hero loop captured off real gameplay, not a mockup
Two full 3D games hosted on the domain — no download, no signup
Graphic-novel interiors in a lightbox with arrow keys, Escape, and focus return
A pre-deploy gate that fails the build before a broken page can ship

The Quantum Melanin Media homepage shown at desktop width beside the same page on a phone.

The part worth reading

Every check passed. The page was still broken.

Anyone can show you a layout. This is the thing that actually separates a finished build from one that merely looks finished.

A hero video that reported perfect health and never played

The hero and the chess reel originally served a VP9 .webm with an h264 .mp4 fallback. Nothing ever reached the fallback, because every browser answers canPlayType("video/webm; codecs=vp9") with "probably" — and then Chrome dies on the file with PIPELINE_ERROR_DECODE about three tenths of a second in. Live, that is a hero frozen on its poster image, on every single visit.

HTTP 200The file served fine.
durationCorrect in the metadata.
ffmpeg -f nullDecoded the identical file with zero warnings.
canPlayTypeReported "probably" in every browser tested.
-crf 34 · -b:v 800kReproduced at every bitrate, and with auto-alt-ref and lag-in-frames tuned.

Every measurement agreed with every other measurement, and all of them were wrong. Only pressing play told the truth.

So the fix was not an encoder setting. It was a format to stop shipping — mp4 only, no <source> list, nothing to fall back from. Then I wrote the check that would have caught it: the pre-deploy harness now presses play on every video on the page and fails the build if the clock does not move. It costs 600 KB on the hero to be certain the hero plays, and that gate is permanent.

What ships with every build

You get the site, and the thing that keeps it honest.

Three tools live in this site's repository. They are the reason a one-person studio can push straight to production without a staging environment.

build_assets

Regenerates every image and video on the site from their real sources — the game repositories, Amazon, Gumroad. Nothing in the assets folder is hand-made, so nothing on the page can quietly go stale while the product moves on without it.

reel

Records genuine gameplay to mp4 by driving a headless build and capturing frames over the debugging protocol. The hero loop is real frames from the real game, which is why it looks like the thing you are about to play.

shot_site

The deploy gate. Serves the repository, screenshots desktop and phone, and fails on 404s, JavaScript errors, broken images, horizontal overflow, and any video whose clock does not advance when you press play.

Sixty seconds, no mockups

Every screen in this is live right now.

A site, an interactive book with twenty-five clickable sources, a twenty-track score, three browser games and an audit practice — all of it running, all of it out of the same room. Nothing here is a comp or a concept. The music changes at 0:47 because the page on screen changes track, and the previews are real.

Every link in it goes somewhere you can check for yourself. Open the book →

Built here, all of it

The game, the film, and the page it lives on.

Real capture from Quantum Motors 3D — a WebGL racer that runs in a browser tab with no download and no plugin. The cuts land where they do because the track was measured at 136 BPM and every clip is a whole number of bars. The game, the edit, the music and this page came out of the same room.

If you need the site and the thing that sells it, that is one conversation instead of three vendors who blame each other. Play the game it came from →

How this usually starts

Three shapes that fit most projects.

If none of them describe your situation, say so in the email and I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person for it.

$85per hour

That is the rate for ongoing and open-ended work. Anything with a clear edge to it I quote as a fixed price instead, so you are buying the outcome rather than my clock — the three below are priced off that same rate, and you see the number before I start, not on the invoice.

Measure it first

$450 fixed

A fixed-scope audit of a site you are unhappy with. You get numbers, not opinions, and a written list of what to fix in priority order.

Real page weight and first-byte timing
What is loading that does not need to
Mobile and accessibility failures, with screenshots
An honest verdict on whether a rebuild is worth it

Build it properly

from $2,400 fixed

A site, a landing page, or a WebGL experience, built the way this one was and handed over with the tooling that maintains it.

Hand-built, framework only where it earns its weight
Three.js / WebGL when the project needs depth
An asset pipeline so the images regenerate themselves
A pre-deploy gate wired to your host

Automate the thing you dread

from $1,200 fixed

The workflow currently eating a person's week. Playwright, Python, and LLM pipelines with verification built in from the start.

Browser automation against real, hostile sites
OAuth, payments, and live-key operations
Multi-agent LLM systems on the Claude Agent SDK
Evaluation harnesses, because plausible is not correct

You are standing in the portfolio.