Sevastopol Terminal

A retro-style terminal interface built as my portfolio website. Inspired by the game Alien: Isolation.

Before this website, my portfolio looked a bit different. At the time I was playing through a game called Alien: Isolation on my Xbox 360. It’s set between the first two Alien movies in the franchise focusing on Ripley’s daughter coming across the notorious ‘Alien’ herself.

The game has these computer terminals placed around the spaceship where you can access ship functions such as doors and read messages to give you any clues. These terminals have a striking and unique retro-futuristic vibe. It immediately caught my eye and I got to work on recreating this design as my website.

I wanted to build a fully interactive portfolio website styled like a Sevastolink terminal:

- CRT aesthetic
- Scanlines overlay
- Green monochrome theme
- Folder navigation with connector lines
- Dynamic content panels
- A Pong game (because why not?)

The idea wasn’t to copy the interface exactly, but to replicate the feeling of it.

Each folder button dynamically calculates its vertical connector line length based on its layout position. When switching folders or entering fullscreen mode, it recalculates the line height to keep everything properly aligned.

To simulate the screen effect, the entire UI sits beneath a scanlines PNG overlay. A bezel image frames the display, and z-index layering is carefully controlled throughout. pointer-events: none is used so the overlays don’t block interaction. These small details make everything feel like it’s being rendered inside a physical monitor.

Next, to match the industrial sci-fi feel of the interface, I used a pixel-style font (Retro Computer).

Lastly, I embedded a fully working Pong game built with the canvas API. It includes dynamic resizing, CPU paddle AI, collision detection, and real-time rendering using requestAnimationFrame. It felt fitting to include an old-school arcade game inside a retro terminal interface.

Some suprisingly tricky things were keeping connector lines aligned when resizing/fullscreen and making the Pong canvas perfectly fill the terminal window. Most of the time wasn’t spent writing logic, it was actually spent adjusting 0.2vw borders and aligning elements by eye until it felt right.

This wasn’t just a UI replication project. It was an exercise in attention to detail and turning nostalgia into implementation. Rebuilding something you admire forces you to understand it deeply. And in this case, it was just as satisfying as playing through the game itself.