Werd I/O

Like a lot of people, the thing that first got me into programming was games. I'd learned rudimentary BASIC as a kid, but it was as a teenager that I started to get a taste for the thrill of making something and sharing it with other people.

Adventure games had always been my favorite. I remember playing a port of the Colossal Cave Adventure; later, I got hooked on Infocom's very well-written output, particularly the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, which was co-written by Douglas Adams himself. Finally, I came across LucasFilm Games, who published The Secret of Monkey Island, which is still my favorite piece of digital entertainment of all time. (Honorable mentions from other genres include SimCity 2000, Railroad Tycoon and Populous; to my shame, I never got into Civilization.)

But it wasn't those games that inspired me to build.

Whereas Monkey Island and its brethren were produced by companies that sometimes felt like (and sometimes literally were) movie studios, the shareware games movement was a rich mine of scrappier, but somehow more creative games. Jeff Minter's Llamasoft was probably the pinnacle of this; its game Llamatron was an off-kilter take on Robotron: 2084 but featuring a llama that battled against mutant Coke cans, Mandelbrot fractals and Mr Potato Heads. (It's worth mentioning that I've never been particularly interested in illicit substances, although I can't speak for Mr Minter.) Its anarchic design was liberating, and it felt doable. It was actually doing some sophisticated things behind the scenes, but nonetheless, for a beginner coder, Llamatron felt within reach.

I started learning as I wrote in Prospero Pascal, and then shared what I'd built with my friends Marcus Povey and Tom Nunn, who were also building. Something happened that was new to me: I felt playfully competitive with them, and everything they built spurred me to try and create something better. It was a virtuous circle. We were 14.

My first game involved a simple maze that was slowly revealed as you walked around it, cribbed in part from one that Marcus had already written. Subsequently, each game became a little more sophisticated. The Numerator ("he's always on top") was a take on Llamatron with a wave audio backing soundtrack. Mr A Goes For a Block was a psychedelic take on Sokoban that made it onto some early-90s shareware CD-ROMs. I wrote a space game with 3D starfields and a collaborative maze game where you flipped between two characters at different ends of the same labyrinth who needed to work together to get out. My crowning achievement, eventually, was Mr Sheepz, another game clearly heavily inspired by Jeff Minter, wherein you had to eat sheep grazing in increasingly-complex fields before giant sheep-eating snails got to them first.

And then I turned my attention to the web and never looked back.

Lately I've become aware of a whole new subculture of independent game developers, who have been experimenting with new forms, narratives and designs, using the web as a medium. Using HTML5 and JavaScript, sometimes in conjunction with engines like CreateJS, Turbulenz and many, many others. Others are building mobile apps; others are building the same kinds of full-screen desktop games that I used to.

My friend Tef recently moved into a flat of indie games devs, one of whom organizes an event called The Wild Rumpus, after Where the Wild Things Are:

It was in August 2011 in a glamorous Nandos (a sordid middle-class chicken hut chain where every dish tastes like cayenne pepper dissolved in lemon juice) that George says he was asked to help form a committee to hold something called ‘The Wild Rumpus’. The Wild Rumpus is game roughhousing: the informal event takes place in a hired bar, features simple lo-fi multiplayer games you can play with friends between drinks. They use projectors and huge screens, and the games are always visually mesmerising, competitively thrilling, or require players to engage in social theatre lubricated by beer. It’s always busy, and there is as much pleasure in spectating the bright colours and social friction that the games bring as there is in actually playing games there. “Closer in spirit to party, playground, or even drinking games, these are all games that you can’t play at home on your own” it is declared. The atmosphere is in between that of a game night with friends and an electro-pop club night with extremely well-behaved patrons.

At the first XOXO, meanwhile, one of the standout moments was discovering a game called Johann Sebastian Joust, which is played by multiple people with controllers, but no screen. It's the kind of game that blurs genres, but that's not the point; it's fun, sometimes hilariously so, and the technology creates a framework that feels like an augmented playground. Indie Game: The Movie, screened at the same event, is as inspiring as any movie about individual creativity.

Games never really went away, but the interconnectivity of the web, the openness of our platforms and the ubiquitous availability of simple technology means that there's more opportunity to experiment than ever before. It's not all about running and shooting things, which I've always found pretty snoreworthy (dalliances with the original Wolfenstein 3D and Doom aside).

It's been a while. I think it would be nice to pick up some tools and build some stupid fun.

My employer, Latakoo, is an enterprise media management company. We help people send files - mostly video, but we're expanding - really fast using any Internet connection.

A lot of our customers are involved in news and journalism. Here's a sample:

Used @latakoo on Air Force One to ship video of POTUS leaving DC as the plane was taxiing! Pretty cool technology. pic.twitter.com/N2rABZcCzF

— Jim Long (@newmediajim) December 9, 2013

It's not uncommon for us to get support requests from journalists in places like Syria who need to get footage out quickly and securely. Shortly, we expect to talking to people in Sochi a lot.

So here's the thing. We're a small, very agile (with a small "a") startup, and we need a little bit of help getting some of our upcoming projects out the door. They're all high profile, directly affect customers who themselves high profile, and are full of really meaty, interesting engineering problems. Oh, and they're based out of Austin or San Antonio in Texas.

Here's what we need:

• A freelance Objective-C iOS developer to help us with our completely redesigned iPhone and iPad apps.
• An experienced freelance PHP developer to help us build our media management interfaces, further expand our international file upload network, and integrate with things like ElasticSearch and CloudFront. Knowledge of HTML5, WebRTC and real-time application development are a big plus.

Sound interesting to you? Great. Email me at ben@latakoo.com, and let's talk!

Please, please, please, no agencies, offshore or otherwise. I want to work directly with individuals, and you have to be local to Austin or San Antonio.

Last week at Homebrew Website Club, I was asked how Idno syndicates to third-party sites like Twitter when I post content.

Here's how it works.

First of all, Idno has a plugin system, that allows new functionality to be added system-wide. As well as new kinds of content like slide presentations, plugins are available that interact with the APIs of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Flickr.

When I install any of those plugins in Idno, I'm taken through a process where I register my Idno site with the third-party API. Each of those sites has a slightly different process, but in each case it takes about 30 seconds.

Once the link has been made, the plugin shows up as an option in Idno's user settings screen. I click "settings", and then click a button to link my account to the site:

This is exactly the same procedure as logging in with any of those sites, or attaching any third-party application. It's about two clicks: in the case illustrated above, I'm taken to Twitter, which asks me to confirm that I want to give Idno permission to use my Twitter account, and then taken back to my Idno settings. Internally, my OAuth token for that site is saved to my user account.

Here's where things get interesting.

Remember I said that Idno's content types are also provided via plugins? There's a plugin for status updates, for photos, blog posts, events, etc etc. Whenever I want to add a new content type to Idno, I add a plugin. (They're really easy to write; the presentations plugin was written in about an hour, while I was recovering from a root canal operation.)

As well as descriptive content type - "status update" - each plugin announces a generic content type that maps to those used by the activity streams specification. A status update is also a "note"; a blog post is an "article". This allows plugins to extend functionality for certain kinds of content without dictating which plugin you use for that content. Someone can add extra logic for status updates, while not caring which status update plugin I actually use.

When I post new content, the system pulls up an interface supplied by that content's plugin, and also asks any syndication plugins if they're able to handle content of this type. So when I click on my "status update" button, Idno asks plugins if they're able to syndicate content of type "note".

Idno automatically renders some buttons for me based on those plugins. If I enable the "Twitter" button, my content will be syndicated to Twitter when I post it. If I enable the "Facebook" button, it'll go to Facebook, too. If I later decide to add a button for Path or LinkedIn or Friendster via a plugin, it'll show up there, and work in exactly the same way, without me having to change any of the status update plugin.

When I hit Save, the syndication plugin receives information about the content type (but not which plugin created it), as well as information about my account. It retrieves my API token from when I linked my account through my settings panel, and uses that to sign an API request posting the content to that site. It then retrieves the URL of the syndicated content and saves it to the local content in Idno, so a "syndicated to" link can be displayed underneath it. (Check at the bottom of this post's page: you'll see a link to Twitter.)

This process works throughout Idno. Photos (of generic type "image") can be syndicated to Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, and while the logic is different for each site, the user interface flow is the same for each one. This works whether I'm posting from a laptop or a phone, and whether I'm on the standard web interface, a custom interface or the API.

It's important to note that none of this takes much time, for any of the parties involved. Writing a content plugin takes about an hour; writing a syndication plugin can take much less time, if the third-party API uses OAuth. Site admins can install a plugin and set it up in a few minutes. The process for the user takes mere moments, and that's the most important thing.

#idno #posse #indieweb