Kyle Abent

Public Early Access launch on Steam. Five years of work aimed at this date.

Wasn’t really planning another album — it just sort of happened. The first song off it is the best song I’ve ever made.

Cleaner name, sharper identity, Steam store updated. The product finally had a name you can say out loud.

Third full-length on Apple Music.

150+ practice sessions of my own data became the landing page’s proof-of-life. Social proof built from actual use, not a screenshot folder.

Dropped the bootstrap-y first draft for a custom dark-theme build with a serif/sans duo and live-data badges. Same site, grown up.

First concrete step toward a public release. Launch countdown goes on the site.

Second full-length on Apple Music.

First full-length album on Apple Music.

The actual start date. First git commit for what would become GuitarSesh. From here, nearly every day since has its own branch in the private repo — the log below is a trimmed index of those dated checkpoints.

First public mention of SongCreator — the seed of what would become GuitarSesh. Posted as a podcast entry before I had any of the code.

Eleven concert pages added in the spring, each with audio + video from shows I’d saved over the years: Senses Fail, Silverstein, Minus the Bear, Rise Against, Sum 41, Bayside, New Found Glory, GBH, 10 Years, Tigers Jaw, The Wonder Years.

NetBeans Java project to generate podcast pages from JSON data. Data-driven static pages before I knew what to call that.

Updated my NS2 Siege Zero mod documentation with video, maps, and a compare-view of changes since 2019.

Added to experience.html with the first entry, Senses Fail. Eleven more followed over the next eight weeks.

Moved the site to HTTPS. Started the multi-page Siege documentation: entities, plugins, maps, and the Space Cow Ranch case study.

Reorganized the nav so the college projects moved to their own section and the newer music + game work could breathe. First “design pass” on the site as a whole.

Built a MySQL-backed database plus an Android companion app that synced it offline via SQLite. First real taste of full-stack.

Finished the degree. Two years of formal CS and software-engineering coursework, capping off the self-taught years that came before. The college archive below is what survived from those semesters.

Ran a public Natural Selection 2 server that reached thousands of players over its lifetime. Built a custom karma/credits system in Lua + JSON, wired to a Trello moderation board and a SQL database. The 2018 writeup includes a representative 4-hour recording of live connection data.

The original backbone of this site. JSP/Glassfish database projects, Android apps (GoFish, Maze), intermediate algebra writeups, and the HTML5 coursework archive — all still live under /archive/college/.

Enrolled in a software-engineering program. This is what pulled me out of the NS2 Siege server work full-time — the focus shifted from ad-hoc plugin code to learning the fundamentals properly.

Started working on NS2 Siege, the Siege game mode for Natural Selection 2. A second chance at programming for a live server after the NS1 days — custom plugins, maps, server management, and the glue code that kept a public server alive. I took it seriously day and night for about two and a half years. Real life eventually pulled me into college full-time and the focus shifted to formal coursework, but these 2014–2017 Siege years are the reason I can do any of this today.

Launched the KAE Podcast and started writing original songs — custom guitar parts composed in Guitar Pro. This was the first time I used Guitar Pro as a composition tool rather than a tab reader.

Ubisoft brought Rocksmith to Windows about a year after the console launch. The PC era is when I became most engaged with the genre as a player and started thinking seriously about music-practice software as a category.

Spent time as a player in the real-guitar rhythm game space, thinking about how notes, tempos, and arrangements could be represented for practice. These were the earliest conceptual roots of what would later become GuitarSesh — an independent take on the genre, built from scratch on open formats.

Ubisoft’s original Rocksmith launched on PS3 and Xbox 360 in North America. I was a player from day one, and the genre of real-guitar rhythm games became a long-running interest that shaped how I thought about music practice software.

What started it all. Plastic frets on a rhythm game that felt so real to play. Every later thread — the Rocksmith years, the years of guitar practice, and ultimately building my own rhythm game for real guitarists — traces back to this game.

Team Fortress 2 launched as part of The Orange Box, and I immediately started hosting a server and writing custom SourceMod plugins — a Roll-the-Dice (RTD) plugin, a sudden-death melee mode, and the admin/moderation glue to keep the server running. First real experience with writing code that other people used live.

Started playing guitar. Everything on the music side of this site traces back to this month — three full albums, 13 years of KAE podcast sessions, and the reason I eventually wrote a rhythm game for real guitarists.

Won an online contest and received a free Epiphone SG-400. It became my primary guitar from 2007 through 2020 — every early recording, every late-night session, every learning-a-song-by-ear moment. The guitar that made the music half of everything here possible.

An extension of what I learned from the TFC days. Natural Selection launched as a free mod for Half-Life, and I spent real time in its servers from 2002 through about 2005 — custom content hosting, moderators, admins, custom scripted gameplay, and 3D environments built in the mapping software. This is where the two threads — games and programming — started actually connecting in my head. Years later I’d come back to the franchise and run my own NS2 server.

The earliest imprint. I was part of a TFC server called Girlpower 2 — 28 players, one admin, and a team of moderators. The admin would write code live on a screen with an audience watching, doing things in the game I didn’t know were possible. That’s what started my love for both games and programming. If you search the server name, it has history — a moment in time that left a permanent mark.