2020 → now
sweetleaf
island
A Roblox café I ran at twelve, rebuilt as a tiny browser world—and a question about what tech loses when girls are given fewer reasons to play.
the actual question
where are the RPGs for girls—and what does their absence mean for the future of tech?
Games are where many future programmers first discover that computers are places they can make things. What happens when girls are given fewer reasons to stay?
At the peak of the pandemic, I suffered from a severe condition that plagued youth more than anyone could have anticipated: a Roblox addiction.
To be fair, twelve-year-old me was not only playing games. I made one. SweetLeaf Cafe was pastel pink and green, and had around 600 community members at its peak. We served donuts and grapefruit milkshakes (??), hosted events, and ran training sessions for future café workers. This was a legitimate thing back then.
the first sweetleaf
The game was barely about serving food. It was about showing up. Someone took orders, someone trained the new hires, someone decorated, and the regulars knew each other.
1 × pink uniform
1 × training shift
3 × regulars online
1 × absurd milkshake
total: a place to be
found in my camera roll
sweetleaf before
the island
The café kept changing because I kept thinking of another room it obviously needed.
okay, but where did everyone go?
Even before 2020, I had friends who played nothing but Adopt Me and Royale High for hours. Once they grew out of those games, they did not move on to other RPGs. They mostly stopped playing.
A lot of computer science students say some version of “I liked video games and wanted to know how they worked.” Mine was not a tidy pipeline. Scratch from MIT gave me a genuinely great community of people sharing things they had made. Roblox gave me another place to play and build, and I worked through Harvard’s CS50 alongside it. Enjoying games grew into a much broader love of technology; computer science became part of that web, not simply the last box in a flowchart.
technology Scratchand its community Robloxplaying + building my own games Harvard CS50 computer science
If games can be an entrance to the field, I keep wondering who never gets that entrance. The lack of girls in computer science obviously cannot be pinned on video games, but the shortage of games that keep girls interested as they grow up probably does not help. When the games disappear, so does one very common reason to start tinkering with code in the first place.
Designing an RPG for a younger female audience does not mean reducing it to princesses, pastels, or neon flying pandas. I want the depth of a proper RPG, but with friendship, collecting, self-expression, caretaking, and hosting treated as real parts of play—not side content before the fighting starts again.
so I brought the café back
The new Sweetleaf is a walkable Three.js island. There is water, changing light, birds, sound, a visitor board, and a donut that rolls around on its edge. It is not a perfect remake. It is the version I remember, with several years of extra imagination piled on top.
I put a rhythm game
in the waterfall
Tide Beats is probably my favourite part of the island. Walk into the conch waterfall and the camera carries you out over the inlet, where four note lanes appear on the water. Pick a song and difficulty, then play with A S D F, the arrow keys, or touch.
I did not want it to feel like a minigame opened from a menu. The lanes actually sit in the water, the waterfall lights react to the beat, and finishing a song leaves you standing in the shallows again.
The songs and hit sounds are synthesized in the browser. The chart follows the audio clock rather than the frame rate, so a busy 3D scene cannot quietly pull the notes away from the music. There are three difficulties, full combos, personal bests, and a small leaderboard because I cannot resist giving people a reason to try one more run.
a day can be enough
An adventure does not always need a boss. Sometimes it just needs three good reasons not to log off.
- morningcollect sea glass after the tidekeep the nicest piece
- afternoonlearn a regular’s impossible orderget it right next time
- eveningleave a note under the lanternssomeone finds it tomorrow
the island is the small version
I am also working on my own RPG designed for a younger female audience. Sweetleaf is where I can mess with the smaller pieces first: how it feels to move, what makes a place worth revisiting, and how players can matter to a world without having to save it every five minutes.
I do not have the whole answer yet. That is the point. For now, there is an island, a café, and a rolling donut.