Games can be a great way to learn new concepts, spend time with friends, or just unwind at the end of a long day. And wouldn't you know it — games are actually a big part of Glitch's DNA!

For our first episode, we talk with Glitch user and software engineer Joe Gaffey about his history with game design, hear from our engineering lead Keith Kurson about fun games to play and remix on Glitch, and we have a roundtable conversation with CEO Anil Dash and other Glitch team members where they talk about our history with games, and mention some of their favorite games of all time.

Looking for bonus content? Our app collection for this episode is where it's at, including links to all the Glitch apps and other games mentioned in this episode and much more!

Executive Producers: Maurice Cherry, Keisha "TK" Dutes
Editor: Brittani Brown
Engineer: Keisha "TK" Dutes

Game On!

Hosanna Tolman:
My top number one video game of all time is Link’s Awakening, Legend of Zelda.

Steph Monette:
So, my favorite game right now is backgammon.

Zainab Shah:
So, my favorite game is called Ludo.

Osmose Kelly:
So, my favorite video game is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

Tasha Hewett:
My favorite game is this pinball machine that’s called Total Nuclear Annihilation.

Jenn Schiffer:
One of my favorite games is Katamari Damacy. The designer, Keita Takahashi, ended up working on the game Glitch that then became the company Slack…and now we’re Glitch.

Maurice Cherry:
This is Shift Shift Forward, a new podcast from Glitch that showcases everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. I’m Maurice. I work on the marketing team here and as you can probably guess, this episode is all about games: the ones we love to play, the ones that inspire our creativity and the ones that make us want to create our own.

Maurice Cherry:
You’ll meet Joe Gaffey, a software engineer by day and a die-hard game creator in his spare time. Later, our engineering lead, Keith, clues us in on game apps on Glitch that anyone can play or remix. But first, let’s eavesdrop on a conversation about how hard we game at Glitch with some of our fellow team members. Software developers, Tim and Greg, our head of legal, Nkasi, and our CEO, Anil. Our producer, TK, kicks things off. Here we go.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
I had no idea people at Glitch were such extensive gamers. What are all your favorite games?

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Oh my goodness. Okay. This is sort of for nostalgic purposes, but also because it’s one of the franchises that manages to keep bringing it. So, the first time I got really into video games was my sister’s eighth birthday when my dad, which he doesn’t like video games at all, surprised her with a Nintendo. Right? And the game that he bought was the Legend of Zelda in the, if anyone remembers, the gold cartridge. It was such an amazing game. And still Nintendo is putting out the hits with Legend of Zelda, like the last one on the Switch, oh my God, what was the name of it?

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Breath of the Wild. So, funny story, I refused to start working at Glitch until I finished that game because it is such a gigantic time suck.

Anil Dash:
The truth comes out now. You were like, “I have some meetings. I can’t start right now.”

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Oh, yeah. Legend of Zelda. All of them. I even played it on the Game Cube, and it was Wind Waker on the Game Cube. So yeah, I would say that’s one of my favorite games, if not my favorite game game. Yeah.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
What about you, Tim?

Tim Kington:
Go’s a strategy game from Japan. It’s, I guess, originally China… It was brought to the US from Japan, but it’s like 4,000 years old. And it’s a one on one game like chess where you have a board, black and white pieces, and it’s a zero sum game. So, somebody win’s, somebody loses. The rules are extremely simple, and it’s really deep

Anil Dash:
And Go’s also how they test a lot of coding and testing AIs and things too. Right? Is it sort of like a common coding challenge as well?

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Is that the game in Avatar: The Last Airbender?

Tim Kington:
Oh, Avatar. No, it’s not. It has the same flavor kind of, yes. Something Lotus, I think it is.

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Yeah. Yeah. For like the Lotus tile?

Tim Kington:
Yeah. It feels like that kind of, but it’s not the same game.

Tim Kington:
Yeah. Go’s used as an AI challenge, and for a long time it was considered sort of the pinnacle of AI challenge. Chess had been knocked out 20 or 30 years ago, and Go was the next big thing. I thought computers won’t be able to beat professional humans at Go. So, I gave a Friday talk here about Go and AI and why it’s so hard, and talked about how it’s at least 10 years away. And then, I gave another talk about six months later saying a computer just beat a pro.

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Greg and Anil, what are your favorite games?

Greg Weil:
Halo 3 because that had this whole custom game system, which was pretty new at the time, where you could to lay out stuff, make your own map, and then they had a separate game type system. And it was just a ton of fun playing like weird modes that people came up with where all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, everyone moves 10 times faster because there’s no friction and you’re at the bottom of a big slope and there are cars sliding at you really fast that the other team is in, and you just need dodge the cars because if they hit you, they win. But if they miss, they’ll fall off the bottom of the ramp and into the ocean.” Just really weird ideas like that, which were just a ton of fun to play.

Anil Dash:
A couple of quick ones. Back in the ’90s, Lucasfilm, George Lucas’s… like the Star Wars company, they had a company called Lucas Arts, and they would make games. And they were mostly like a star Wars version of whatever games were popular. And then, they did one game called Grim Fandango, that was themed around the Day of the Dead in Mexico, and it was like a a murder mystery, Noir thriller, adventure game with really heavy candy skull art. it was just beautiful and great world building, and I’d never seen anything like it. And I think that really changed my perception of what games were. I think in a similar vein, the first Portal game just blew me away.

Anil Dash:
It was like you felt your brain bending, it was thing teaching you as you went. That was actually in the first notes of when we were prototyping Glitch and stuff. The first thing I thought of was Portal was this idea of what’s possible changes as you use it? And you want something where playing it teaches you what you could do. I just thought that was masterful game design.

Anil Dash:
My all time favorite game is Mario Kart. Obviously, there’s the trash talking part and whatever, but the serious part was like, it was something where there was both immediately accessible to a normal person who could walk in and just button mash and do all right. And then, there was this infinitely deep finesse where the more you want to practice and you wanted to have your preferences… I like this character and this car and whatever. And I just really, really loved the blue shell, which was this idea… Everybody hates the blue shell, and what I loved about it was there was an intention to the game design, which was like, if you’re running away with it, and it’s not fair and it’s not going to be fun for everybody, the game is going to empower somebody to be like, “All right, let’s keep it close. Let’s keep this thing fun.”

Anil Dash:
So, there’s a whatever, a kid that’s playing for the first time, and somebody like me who’s been playing for 30 years or whatever can play together and still have fun. And I see that now all the time where I got a kid, I got an eight year old son, and he’s good. I don’t have to spot him. He’s doing all right. But even before he was, you could play something together and share this thing, and it’s the nostalgia aspect of like, “I grew up playing this and you grow up playing this.” But also, that intentionality, I think about all the time. Somebody made this technology, and you think about all the math behind it to get all these shapes up on the screen, and they’re like, “We’re going to design a system where people can sit together and have a good time together.” And that shows up in the work. And I just thought, “man, those people were doing good with their lives.”

Anil Dash:
Literally from day one, it was always gamers, but it was a lot of… Well, board games was a big part, so it wasn’t always video games. So, the DNA, the gaming DNA, of the company is deep.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
I heard there was a bridge game. Is that true?

Tim Kington:
It’s true. Yeah. That one got started because our former president, Rich Armstrong, was really into bridge, and I think I mentioned that I played bridge when I was here my first week or something, so he wanted to get a bridge game together. And we drafted a couple of people and made them learn bridge.

Anil Dash:
I came in, and I’d heard about the bridge game. It predated me. And I joined the company, I was like, “This sounds like…” I pictured like a dark room and everybody’s got those accountants visors on, and you’re just about to get… Like they’re going to run the table [inaudible 00:00:08:27]. They’re just going to [inaudible 00:08:28] you because they’re like the bridge experts. There’s Tim’s, who’s like the mathematical mind, and they’re like, “Oh, I’ll just teach you how to play.” Really, you’re just outmatched.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
I heard from a little birdie that also we had a connection to the folks at Slack or a connection to playing games on Slack?

Anil Dash:
Back in the day, they had started a game called Game Neverending. God, this was probably 20 years ago at this point. And it was beautiful and this great art, and a core base and die hard users, but then everybody else is sort of like, “This is like intense. I don’t know…” You wouldn’t casually go up to Game Neverending and start playing it., And then they built another game, and it was called Glitch, and it was the same as Game Neverending. It was like wild art, massively multiplayer game. Everybody’s in the RPG core base of die hard users, not a whole lot of people playing, and they had built a tool that helped them make the game, and that that tool was called Slack.

Anil Dash:
And then, again, they did the same thing. They were just like, “Nobody wants our games but we’re going to build the tool.” And then, they became Slack, and they’re now multibillion dollar company and I think all of those people have private islands or whatever. But I guarantee you when they’re going to retire, they’re going to be like, “Let’s build a game, and it’s only going to have a couple of users, but it’s going to be really cool looking.”

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
And then, you said we got our name was similar way?

Anil Dash:
Well, what happened was the team had built a prototype of what became Glitch, and we were like, “We need a new name for it,” or whatever. And I think just independently… Tim, you tell me if I’m wrong. My recollection is we came up with the name Glitch independently at one of the early meetings where we’re like, “That’d be a cool name.” But it was like, “Oh, but it’s taken.” And I was like, “Well, I bet they would do a solid.” So, because I knew them, I was just like, “Look, it’s not going to be bad. It’s going to be cool like your game.” And then, they were like, “All right, let’s do a deal and let’s get you the name.” And so, Glitch, for like the first, I don’t know, six months that Glitch was running, our site, our tools of Glitch were running, but one of the top search terms that would come in was Glitch the game because people were still looking for that old game in the [inaudible 00:10:26].

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
Well, we have a programmer that makes games here. Greg, you were telling me over beverages, I don’t want to say what kind of beverages, because you’re here, you’re a web developer at Glitch, but on your off time you make games. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Greg Weil:
I like making games a lot because whenever you’re making one, you end up touching a whole range of different skills, I guess, where you start out where it’s just, “I’m going to code up some movement. I’m going to focus a lot on just making it feel responsive and fun to play.” But then all of a sudden it’s, “I need some sprites for the character moving around, and they need to look good. And also, they need to still fit the gameplay and all the other different kinds of things.” And all of a sudden you need sound effects, and then all of a sudden you need the ability for multiple people to play together. And all of a sudden, it feels like you’re doing like 20 different skill sets but just a little taste of all of, which is a lot of fun to work on.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
For you guys that make the things that we love so much, what are my game options on Glitch?

Greg Weil:
There are a couple games on Glitch that are kind of surprising and a little tricky to find sometimes. I saw one on the forum just like a week ago that was pretty neat. It looked like an online World War II bomber kind of thing where different players are… It’s massively multiplayer, everyone goes into a single world, and you’re flying around planes in the top down perspective.

Tim Kington:
There’s a Snake game out there that’s a clone of the old Apple II, Snake Byte, the grandfather of the Snake game on your phone.

Tim Kington:
Yeah. And that one has clones of all the levels. So, there were like 20 levels in that game, I think, and it has different walls in different places and gets harder as you go along. I kind of enjoy that one.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
That’s classic. I’m going to jump over to Nkasi because I don’t think people think that the office’s legal counsel is going to be out here organizing a whole Mario Kart tournament. Can you talk about that?

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
During my interview, and Neil, I don’t even know how it came up, but he’s talking about Mario Kart and how he was awesome at it. And I was like, “Oh man, I need to confirm all the boasting that was going on in this interview.” So, our onsite came along, and I was like, “Do you know what? This is the perfect opportunity. This is the perfect opportunity.” And so, actually, I got together with Greg and another engineer here, Victoria, and we created the Mario Kart tournament. It was actually really easy. Maybe we accidentally indexed for it, but a lot of people really know how to play Mario Kart, like serious, serious know-how. Like brought their own controllers, like, “No, I want to use this specific controller because then I can actually fly it into things.” So, yeah.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
Playing games at Glitch sounds like inviting singers to karaoke.

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
I mean, I guess. That is definitely true. I did come to [inaudible 00:00:14:00], but I didn’t think about it. I was just like, “Oh, maybe there’ll be three or four people that would be interested in that.”

Greg Weil:
Yeah, yeah. All the quiet folks all of a sudden got real loud. It was good.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
So, with that being said, all of y’all, and especially Nkasi, any plans firstly for another Mario Kart tournament or any plans for any other game nights at Glitch?

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
What I would really love to do, and whether it’s a game… I think you could consider it a game, but I love Rock Band. Love it. Love it. Love it.

Anil Dash:
Now that I hear that, that’s the most surprising thing I’ve ever learned about you. I’m like, “Yes, that fits.”

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
I don’t know what you mean by that. We’ll have a discussion later.

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Offline. But that’s something I’ve been floating around in my head because, then, you can have people at the same time singing some amazing tunes. And I’ve learned a lot of different rock songs through Rock Band, that I had never heard of, and now are there on my iPhone playing it all day. So, that’s what I’m kicking around in my head for the next onsite.

Maurice Cherry:
Next up, meet Joe Gaffey, a telecoms enterprise software architect by day and a gamer and creative coder by night.

Joe Gaffey:
Yeah, I was into games and coding from quite a young age, actually. I remember seeing arcade machines probably in the early ’80s in local fast food restaurants and such places and thinking these were the best things ever. So colorful and loud and so different from anything else that was around at the time. And these were actually the first computers that I interacted with. Later on, we had an Atari 2600 in the house, and that got lots of use too. Then when I was a little older, I found some coding books in the public library, and I used to read the program listings before I even had access to a real computer. I got my first computer, then, from my parents for Christmas around the age of 10 or so. It was an eight bit era. Commodore 64, one of those ones with the cassette player for loading software. Took about 10 minutes to load 64 [inaudible 00:16:13].

Joe Gaffey:
So, I started coding basic games like Pong and brick breaking games and so forth, and Commodore PET BASIC. Then whenever I was playing commercial games on a C 64, I was always really trying to understand the game mechanics and looking for glitches and insights into how the game worked under the hood. Then once I discovered all of the mechanics of the game, I usually got bored and moved onto the next one or maybe try to recreate something from it in my own code.

Maurice Cherry:
With his love of old school games, some programming knowledge under his belt, and a desire to code, Joe got competitive.

Joe Gaffey:
Yeah. Get Up game off competition turned up with retro gaming team. I taught it. It was really a good opportunity to bring together some of my different interests. I was originally thinking of of Asteroids, a clone of Asteroids, perhaps with a mix of like Lunar Lander mechanics thrown in. But then I thought about those old, colorful, and loud Galaxian and Galaga machines. I thought it would be a great example of a retro gaming game to show my kids and hopefully get them into interested in coding as well. To make it a little more interesting for modern audiences, I added some original mechanics like the [up 00:17:24] red pills, the destruct orb, smart bomb, and the wingman assist, and of course the end game boss battle. If you use one of the destruct orbs just at the right time, you can take out an entire wave in one shot, so there’s a little tip. A [inaudible 00:17:39] in the game off that year, which I was very pleased with.

Maurice Cherry:
Here, Joe weighs in on how he used Glitch to make Galaxeroids.

Joe Gaffey:
Well, I really key benefit for me was portability. I did not much free time when he’s working on Galaxeroids, so I was taking every opportunity to get some coding done using whatever device I had to hand. And having the web based editor made this really easy of course. I actually coded it the whole thing and produced all of the art assets such as they are in the browser as an experiment to see if it all could be done that way. Gethub integration was also a great help, so I could easily create snapshots and forks as needed. Example, for releasing into different app stores. I actually published Galaxeroids into the Microsoft store and the [inaudible 00:18:22] game store as a progressive web app. T. Then making Galaxeroids a PWA on Glitch, I was able to test on any mobile device I can put my hand on, and I was able to send beta links to friends, to family to test some their devices and then make changes on the fly so I could test the fixes immediately.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s no secret. Joe loves retro gaming, but he’s really got his eye on the future.

Joe Gaffey:
I like to play simple games with my kids like platformers, like Mario Bros. and Tetris, but I’ll give most genres a go. So, I’ve done some other experiments with games. In another experiment on Glitch, I built a Guitar Hero/Rock Band clone called Rockstar, which uses the web MIDI and web Gamepad APIs. [inaudible 00:19:07] playing along with MIDI tunes using the actual Rock Band instruments, guitars and drums. It actually worked pretty well in the end. Needs a little bit of UX tidying now, of course. More recently, I’ve gotten into driving simulators in VR, and that’s a whole different experience. And my latest splits experiment, which I called WD-40 for some reason, comes from that interest, and so my first real attempt at 3D programming on the web.

Joe Gaffey:
It’s a physics-based driving simulator based on three.js with ammo.js physics. And it’s pretty basic right now, just extends one of the ammo.js code examples. But my idea is to use it to experiment with upcoming web standards like the upcoming USB web hitch ID, human interface device API, so I want to see if it’s possible to build a full driving simulator where USB-based steering wheel and pedal controls, including full force feedback, just using web standards and technologies running in the browser. I eventually, I’d like to experiment with WebXR, as well, and mixed reality. Maybe driving an RC car remotely on the web over WebRTC, that sort of stuff. Like somebody [inaudible 00:20:24] experiments, I try to push the boundaries of what’s considered feasible to do with web standards technologies in the browser and keeping the source code as open and accessible as possible at the same time, and Glitch is really perfect for that.

Joe Gaffey:
I’m quite passionate about the open web and the idea that anybody can look under the hood of a website and see how it works just by clicking on the view source option. Unfortunately, that’s not so easy to do these days with modern web frameworks, but you want to be able to take advantage of JavaScript and create this rich experience that offers, especially for games and demos, but ideally to do it in a way that supports open and accessible coding. I think in this way, platforms like Glitch shows there’s a real opportunity to realize the vision of the social rewrite web as originally described by Tim Berners-Lee in the early days of the web.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, let’s talk to a member of the team to get the lowdown on some glitch apps that anyone can code, use, or remix for themselves.

Multiple Speakers:
Welcome to the App Review.

Keith Kurson:
Hi, I’m Keith Kurson. I’m an engineering lead at Glitch. I run what is now called the Dotcom team. So, we make everything on Glitch that isn’t part of the editor, so the front page, collections, user profiles, all of that.

Keith Kurson:
One of my favorite is called Figma Pacman, and I use this tool called Figma which is what our designers [inaudible 00:22:01] use and a lot of other designers to build layouts. It’s sort of the design tool at the moment. But we’ve seen some really interesting uses of Figma and other tools that aren’t traditionally used for this on Glitch. And so, Figma Pacman is an example of an app where you, in Figma, draw a little maze like what Pacman runs through, and then Glitch users can plug in that URL and then play Pacman on that maze. And so, it’s a really cool combination of two different tools. And people who aren’t that technical… So, it was made by a designer who uses Figma all day and doesn’t get a lot of time to do programming, and so anyone can jump in and make their own maze without really needing to know how to program. And I think that’s really cool and shows off what Glitch games can look like.

Keith Kurson:
And then, the second one that I really, really love, that I’ve played a bunch of times, is called PowerSlides, and you’ve probably seen some version of this in the city that you live in performed live. But basically, it takes a bunch of random slideshows from all over the internet, so government slideshows, weird marketing slides, things like that, and combines them into one huge database. And when you start the game, it chooses 10 of them randomly and you have five minutes to give a South by Southwest style presentation with these totally random slides that could just have a picture of a dolphin and say, “Think of the dolphins,” or a text line that just says, “iPhones for dogs,” and you have to give a presentation like you’re trying to sell this thing. And that is really fun to watch people do.

Maurice Cherry:
Want more gamer goodies? We made a collection filled with bonus content where you can play the Glitch apps mentioned in this episode, see a list of the team’s favorite games, and check out a game related articles and more on Glimmer. You’ll find a link to the collection in the show notes. That’s it for the first episode of Shift Shift Forward, a show about everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. Our website is glitch.com/SSF, and our Twitter handle is @Glitch. Let us know what you think about this episode on social media by using the hashtag #shiftshiftforward. And if you really liked the show, then subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

Maurice Cherry:
Here’s what’s coming up on Shift Shift Forward. A lot of us are sheltered in place and adjusting to the reality of living and working from home for the foreseeable future, and technology is a big part of that. So, who is considered to be in tech these days? 

Maurice Cherry:
Shift Shift Forward is produced by Maurice Cherry and Keisha TK Dutes, with editing by Brittany Brown and sound design and mixing by Keisha TK Dutes. Special thanks to the entire team at Glitch.

He also serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Data & Society Research Institute, and was formerly a contributing editor of WIRED. He’s been blogging since 1999 and won’t stop telling people about that one time he was on the Desus and Mero late-night show.

Incidents

The Workers Who Keep the Web Safe in an Unsafe World

Animal Crossing Helped Me Get Back to Real Life

New Rules of the Classroom: Remote Teaching in the Age of Covid-19

Better Tech: Why We Need Calm Technology Now More Than Ever

Function with Anil Dash

Open World is a fiction anthology podcast about how science and technology serve as a backdrop for imagining a better future, helping us envision the positive influence that science and tech can play in a real future. 

Open World is produced by Keisha "TK" Dutes and hosted by critically-acclaimed podcaster Rose Eveleth, for Glitch. By speaking to the pressing concerns of our times through love, friendship, community, compassion, and sustainability, the host will help listeners imagine new ways forward into a future that is less scary and more positive, and something we can start working on constructively.  

Open World launches weekly episodes in Spring 2020. Want to contact the show? Email youropenworld@glitch.com.

Open World

Shift Shift Forward is a podcast that showcases everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. We’ll talk to some of our top creators, explore cool apps, and even hear from the people who work at Glitch!

Shift Shift Forward

From idea to code in seconds, build and learn alongside the most creative coders on the Web

Welcome to the Glitch Blog ✨

— Glitch Blog

A new version of Glitch.com is in the works, so we need your help!

Earlier this year, our team began working on the most important project we’ve ever done — building a whole new Glitch the way we’ve always wanted it to be, in collaboration with our community. If you’ve been following along in the forums, this won’t be a surprise, since building it in public with you is crucial to our shared vision of the next version of Glitch. 

This September, we began sharing our work in the form of a development preview site, https://preview.glitch.com/. If you haven’t had the chance to review it and give feedback, please do! As you will see, we’ve been busy iterating on the new version, all while sharing ideas for features, filing bugs, and asking you to brainstorm along with us. Glitch should be something we create together and we are so excited to be working alongside the community to make that vision a reality.

For our next big phase, some of the hard work to rebuild Glitch has to happen under the hood, modernizing and updating our infrastructure. We’re kicking off this next phase soon, a long-awaited and highly requested set of upgrades that will include a move to more modern versions of Node.js. And to do that, we’re going to need your help — it’s a little bit like a collective cleanup effort that helps benefit the whole community

Retiring the very oldest versions of Node.js

Our community cleanup will start with projects that are running on the very oldest versions of Node.js — Node 6. This is a tiny percentage of Glitch apps (less than 1%), so the vast majority of you don’t have to do anything. But if you might have any Node 6 apps, we’ll have a few simple steps to follow.

Here’s what you’ll need to do: Review your projects in the Glitch dashboard, and update any projects using Node 6 within the next two weeks, by December 1. (We’re also currently working on improvements to the dashboard so that you’ll be able to easily see at a glance which version of Node.js your projects are using, so keep an eye out for that.) If you’re not sure how to do that kind of update, we’ve got a help doc and a forum thread where the community is discussing the process.

We’ll be deprecating older versions of Node on a timetable, meaning that if your project is using Node 8, we’ll ask that you update it to a newer version by December 15. After that, we won’t be deprecating any more versions until we’ve completed a major container update in the first quarter  of 2024. You’ll get plenty of notice before any changes.

How do I update my project’s Node version?

Not sure how to update your project? We have new and updated Help Center articles to walk you through the process! It might sound complicated, but it should only require editing your project’s package.json file. Read this Help Center article for the full details. As always, if you run into any issues, you can reach our support team directly through our Help Center.

If you have any questions about this update, or the ongoing project of rebuilding Glitch, please let us know by sharing in the community forum. We’ll be sharing even more updates starting next week, so we’ll see you there! 

All of the work we’ve been doing in collaboration with our community is to set Glitch up for being a healthy, thriving and creative platform for many years to come. The beta version of Glitch launched more than seven (!) years ago, and a lot of tech has changed and been upgraded since then. This work sets us up to be able to move a lot faster and to deliver a lot more of the features you’ve asked for.

We also wanted to return to some of our original principles in creating Glitch — working more closely with our community, and supporting open ways of connecting to the rest of the web. You’re already starting to see some of the first results of that work on our new preview site.

Upgrading a platform where every creator is a coder who can have complete control of their code is a tricky process. Doing that at a scale of millions of apps and users is even more challenging. We’re excited about the chance to do this process together with all of you, and really appreciative of the trust and patience you all consistently show as we have been doing this work.

(Re)Building Glitch

Sometimes slow and steady does win the race. Especially when it comes to good news. This October, conservationists discovered that for the first time in eleven years, the white rhino population in Africa has finally increased! In fact, their overall population increased by 5.6% in the last two years. What does this mean for the Glitch community? Hopefully it takes a little pressure off to create the perfect project the first time around, or even seventh time. 

Speaking of building projects, in case you missed it, we’ve been building a new Glitch with you—the creator community—over in our community forum. Head over there to get a sneak peek at the new site preview.glitch.com, give feedback on ideas, or make your suggestions. We’re building the next iteration of the site, and the community, together! 

In other big news from October, our pals at Paradowski Creative, makers of Above Par-adowski (your favorite virtual mini-golf game), released their next big game this month: The Escape Artist. It’s hosted on Glitch, and accessible via your preferred VR headset, so check it out! A preview of their beautiful work is what you see above in the header image. 

Lastly, this month we kicked off a community initiative we’ve been wanting to do for forever: Glitch Community Code Jams! Head to the forum to find out what jams are, and how you can participate. Now, for the good stuff—the projects the Glitch community built in October 2023!

~artistic-concise-zebu by @aieong is a cat-centric virtual experience integrating so many of the things we love: music, pastels, flying playing cards and more. 

~artwalk22 created by @emmettbaber is a virtual (and Android compatible) WebXR experience of the Eugene ArtWalk from 2022.

~star-languid-fahrenheit by @dmarcos shows what happens when you load Gaussian splattings on a single line of HTML (it’s pretty cool!)

~polished-foggy-wilderness by @marwie is another demo showing the Blender to web workflow with Needle Engine (watch the video here!)

Don’t stare at ~rainbowphenakistiscope by @blippypixel for too long, it made me dizzy pretty quick.

Guess as many London Underground metro stations as you can, with this guessing game created by our Fastly friend @kailanblanks. 

~random-horror-movie by @cfjedimaster helped a lot of people find the perfect scary movie during spooky season 

~london-underground-stations by @mapsmania is the original Tube Guesser game, inspiring the one Kailan created!

~pepperoni by @angstr.m is a cool web font that is generated in the browser. 

~babypi by @kfarr was inspired by Early Games and uses a Raspberry Pi to create a simple learning game for the youngest of youngsters. Check out the two-part tutorial to build your own! 

CONTENT WARNING: The next section includes important tools that are used for activism, including one that documents sexual assault, and one with images of a 3D printed nude bust. 

~violenciacontramujeres-yanipaper created by @YaNiPaper is an interactive map that geolocates the points where there was a sexual assault or femicide documented since 2018 in the city of Guadalajara. 

~dbn by @LingDong- is a browser-based version Design By Numbers, the predecessor to Processing.js. 

~ai-training created by @denzelsedwards, @AndyForest, and @becherachapman walks you through the steps of training an AI program with Micro:bit.

Need a Mastodon Oauth2 workflow that works with Python and Flask? @macgill has you covered with ~mastodon-oauth-python-flask! 

~becoming-real by @arit007 is a PatriotHacks project that wonders what a digital self could look like using 3D printing. Good inspiration for our “self portrait” code jam!

The SAG-AFTRA strike is over, so to celebrate, here is a virtual Timotheé Chalamet paper doll, created by @kris10cabrera. We’ll let you know if we find a Pedro Pascal one. 

~traveling-alike-aunt by @stejeda is a choose your own adventure-style story that takes you through the phases of aging.

~infinethum-ephemeral by @sheIby generates brand new art with the click of a button.

~heartbreak-cards by @n.hieda is a collection of autobiographical collectors’ cards, created during a 24-hour period in August 2023.

And finally, ~christmasheardle for 2023, created by @russellc is now live!  

And that’s a wrap on another amazing month for the Glitch community! Follow us across the open social web 🌐 

You can still send your projects and playlists to us via the community forum, or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

Sometimes slow and steady does win the race. Especially when it comes to good news.

October 2023 on Glitch: Slow and Steady

Let’s face it, September was full of fails. Travelers tried to put their pets through TSA’s x-ray machines. Americans discovered that they’ve never even heard of the best flavors made by KitKat. And to top it all off, it took New Jersey police two weeks to capture a loose alligator. On the other hand, sometimes it all depends on how you look at things. It’s possible that in these fails, family pets discovered a love of flying, US citizens learned they could order KitKats (like Churro flavored ones!!) online, and one alligator had the best summer vacation of its life. 

We’ve definitely been trying to look at things a different way at Glitch. If you haven’t heard yet, we’ve been testing out a new site. You can check it out at preview.glitch.com and visit the Glitch community forum where we’re asking for your feedback, sharing sneak peeks, and giving the community as many updates as we can churn out to keep up with your ideas! 

Speaking of updates, seeing Andy Dilallo’s new Glitch in Bio reminds me that we recently pushed a bunch of updates to the Glitch in Bio starter, so if you want to implement them, be sure to read Keith Kurson’s update on the forum. And now, your feature presentation, the very cool things the Glitch community built in September! 

~postmarks by @ckolderup is an ActivityPub bookmarking and sharing site that you can customize easily by remixing!

~pipesmarks by @andypiper is their remix of Postmarks, seriously you should try it!

~ossified-cooing-script by @jwgabriel55 is a cool <model-viewer> demo template you can use to quickly see your 3D models online.

~minimal-i18n-library by @janmonschke is not a new app, but a very important one that’s making the rounds again. 

~conant-gasket, created by @christianp, is a visualization of the Conant Gasket, which I’ve just learned is a “particular configuration of vertical and horizontal unit segments drawn between adjacent points in the non-negative integer grid.” M. Douglas McIlroy.

~discover-music is a free app created by the University of York, aimed at helping people find music makers and music makers to find people.

~best-practices by @n.hieda and @guevarajorge is an in-progress project called “Stage for Digital, Contagious, and Networked Bodies and Code++” (SFDCANBAC++) which allows audience members to participate in the ephemeral experience of bodies, colorful objects, live-coding and glittering pixels continuously changing their constellations on the stage. 

~audiogram created by @tennyson, is a browser-based version of NY Public Radio app that lets you create shareable waveform animations right in the browser!

~moldy-world, by @swimygraphics, is an incredible collection of moldy foods, kept updated. 

~hakko by @ooooootasora4321 and @ootaoota0038, is a collection of “memos” capturing varying scenes of human life — it’s a very interesting read!

~streets-of-winchelsea by @mapsmania is a variation of San Francisco Street Names, which also inspired yet another interactive map game, ~london-park-names, so if you love map games, welcome to this rabbit hole!

~lace-difficult-trombone, also known as Scrubstack, created by @elankiderman, finds a random Substack for you to read. (Note: Substacks are unmoderated, and may contain harmful stuff; browse at your own risk.)

~fissh, created by @goatlizardmail, is a web fish! Kinda…

~mus-cog-matters is a podcast series, hosted on Glitch, which focuses on promoting interdisciplinary and collaborative music cognition research.

~mnist-demo, by @bwasti1, is a demo which uses WebAssembly and Loop Tool.js to create an in-browser algebra compiler. 

We saw this cool VR tutorial going around, and discovered that it featured ~artutexample by @emmettbaber. It’s a quick watch so check it out! 

~peptide-blend-calculator, by @dregsow is a calculator that helps you in finding end dosage amounts when combining multiple peptides of potentially different amounts into a single vial/dose.

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~flatvend, which looks like a work of art, and is also @Jakehill3’s portfolio of digital zines. Check them out!

Let’s face it, September was full of fails.