Keeping decentralized networking fun with Spritely
The Spritely Institute: a research institution
Research means collaboration
In the off chance you didn't know Spritely
Pre-Spritely
Goblins!
Hoot!
OCapN!
And social stuff?!!?!
We're working on it, more later…
So… what's with the games?
Games are not the goal!
But they help our goals!
- Good for stress testing infrastructure
- Help people "experience" complicated topics
- Games keep things fun!
- But you have to scope them right!
Goblins
Goblins is:
- A distributed programming environment
- Builds on a powerful security paradigm (capabilities)
- Transactional with automatic state rollback on unhandled errors
- Time traveling distributed debugger
- Persistent: secure serialization of a Goblins object graph to disk
Wait what?
How about we just show you instead?
Terminal Phase
Terminal Phase time travel
Time-traveling distributed debugger
Debugging example
Causality graphs
OCapN: The Object Capability Network
Fantasary v0.1: Chat in the terminal
Fantasary v0.2: Chat in the browser!
Persistence
Terminal Phase persistence
Hoot:
- We want our software in the hands of users
- We want to target the web
- but we use Scheme!
- Hoot compiles Scheme to WebAssembly
Early days: Wireworld
Next steps: Strigoform
Hoot meets Goblins: Cirkoban
Cirkoban
Community participation
Lisp Game Jam
Lisp Game Jam results
- 48 games submitted
- 15 written in Guile Scheme
- 11 built with Hoot
- 9 community projects!
System Crafters live stream
David Wilson streaming the development of Lambda Dungeon
Scoping games
Recap of how games help our goals
- Good for stress testing infrastructure
- Help people "experience" complicated topics
- Games keep things fun!
- But you have to scope them right!
"Virtual worlds tend to be more interesting to their developers than their users."
– Virtual worlds pioneer Chip Morningstar
So why build a virtual world?
"[Virtual worlds] let you bring a lot more of your innate neural hardware to bear on the problems that need to be solved.
By helping concretize problems that are otherwise very abstract, they make these problems a lot easier to think about."
– Chip Morningstar
2D is complex enough
Recommended reading
http://farawaytimes.blogspot.com/2023/02/how-to-make-good-small-games.html
Time box your projects
Call to participate
Try our games!
Join in development!
Let's build secure, distributed systems together!
Donate!
