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

Sometimes it feels like time is going by so fast, but as 2022 hops on from month to month we find that taking time out to reflect on the things that happen each month helps to demonstrate just how much is accomplished by the Glitch community each and every day. Recognizing your hard work, the kindness that you put out into the world, and the sense of wonder created by your imaginative projects is a constant reminder of how much curiosity and joy exists and the potential to discover even more. 

To complement that work, we recently gave the glitch.com homepage a long look and decided to jazz things up a little. We hope you enjoy the recent update. And, in case you missed it, our director of community, Jenn Schiffer recently appeared in a webinar with friends from Fastly and EdgeMesh to discuss Democratizing the Edge where many Glitch community shoutouts happened. Let’s continue the celebration of your efforts with April’s roundup of awesome projects, playlists, and more!

True,~park by@oa495 is an oldie but came up in a discussion about accessibility and drag-and-drop implementations. It’s such a neat example, we had to share!

~speakgame by @r0 is a game where you guess which language has the most native speakers

~emojia by @LingDong- is an online multiplayer world made ~~entirely~~ of emojis.

~whack-a-paw by @NatoshiBanamoto is a cute lil whack-a-mole game

To celebrate 9000 followers on Twitter, @adarosecannon made ~scouter!

~needle-bike is a WebXR bike configuration app that @marwie built and shared in our forum

~market-forces by @OkayHughes is a very visually satisfying art project, just watch.

~digitiser-cartoon-strip-generator is an old cartoon strip generator that @doug brought back from the Wayback Machine and put onto Glitch so it can live again!

~nails by @CharStiles allows you to click and drag in the embed for an odd surprise

~a-small-memorial by @toddwords is a beautiful, interactive memorial, part of this new online journal, The HTML Review

~dapper-lofty-elk by @ladylarisa123 is an awesome looking coded poem from an SFPC student

~aromatic-paint-tire by @ariaandsam excuse generator, anyway I would’ve loved to have gone out tonight but I’m currently looking for my wallet.

~bill-split-app is a sweet bill-splitting utility by @cool-peaches, who replied to the latest Glitch newsletter to share it!

YOU WOULDN’T DOWNLOAD A CAR (by @OverlappingElvis lol)

~phone-from-dilemma by@aTylerRobertson is a fully-featured replica of Kelly Rowland's spreadsheet phone in the music video for Dilemma.

~lassoism is a Ted Lasso-ism generator by @danfishgold and @lexipedia.shir. That’s right, Betty White.

~dot-cats is like Dwarf Fortress but with cats by @bengarvey and @sashatgarvey

Check out these cool cats dropping in ~overly-particular by @rowan-m

~kyloscosplaycarousel by arianna1098765 is the greatest Star Wars fansite created.

Even though we love cats, ~knockitoverfinal by@haue807 is an annoying-cat simulator

~glib-shorthaired-foxglove by @Reddlake is a simple keyboard drum kit

~bluez by @RonakChovatiya is a cool audio visualizer

~build-excellent-websites by@hankchizljaw is a guide to help you...build excellent websites!

@giulia.laco's CSS playlist includes a few apps to aid in teaching CSS concepts

…and for the JS crowd...@dublinacademy's JavaScript Help playlist shows some simple JavaScript concepts

@robloxrules has a playlist with a couple of instrument apps!

We love hearing what you love about Glitch, and all of the unique ways the community experiences Glitch, or how it empowers them to create. Here is a recent shout-out. 

The app being discussed here is ~only-the-questions created by Clive Thompson and we couldn’t agree more! Read Clive’s post on the motivation behind building this project.

The biggest thanks, of course, goes out to you—the Glitch community for continuing to make the web and the world, a fun and special and interesting place to be. As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~double-pendulum-grid by @d.carverwilliams and was posted in the oddlysatisfying subreddit. It definitely earns that placement.

Sometimes it feels like time is going by so fast, but as 2022 hops on from month to month we find that taking time out to reflect on the things that happen each month helps to demonstrate just how much is accomplished by the Glitch community each and every day.

Last month on Glitch, the April 2022 edition

They say March “comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb.” But the Glitch community is worldwide and knows no seasons, so we say March 2022 came in like a blobby duderino and went out like non-stop K-pop Heardle clones. Many K-pop Heardle clones. We truly love to see it! 

In case you missed it, we’re still signing folks up for Fastly’s Compute@Edge on Glitch beta if you want to give that a try. Otherwise please enjoy some of these standout projects from the Glitch community, and most importantly keep creating and keep sharing!

~pudim by @leonardoazzi is a 3D image of Pudim, a traditional Brazilian pudding 😋

~l-2d by @LingDong- is a drawing program for …drawing!

~relative-fiction by @filipnest uses the Foursquare API and OpenWeatherMap for creating dynamic stories.

This calculator by @anvesh.dunna looks so real!

~classic-ambitious-banon by @AlisonStevens is a really cool dance animation simulator!

~urjournal by@miamylva is an audio collection of people reading their journal.

~wheel-of-side-projects by@lmorchard is a spinning wheel to help decide on a prospective side project.

One from the Glitch forum Gallery is ~theglitchpwa by @tiagorangel, an unofficial PWA starter.

~jpeg-sandbox by @OmarSamehShehata lets you “interactively edit individual DCT blocks in any JPEG image in the browser”

~billowy-neighborly-sauce is a Pomodoro timer with a text area to write your code for that session. It was a 100devs mini hackathon project with several collaborators!

~serifu-sketchpad by @pts is a Serifu comic script markup editor.

~url-hosted-bookmarklet by @PatrickWeaver is a handy tool where you can save a bookmarklet code in a shareable URL!

~ai-training by @denzelsedwards connects the micro:bit to Teachable Machine.

~lightspeed-media by @avigoldman is a bookmarklet that will speed up video on webpages, and it works on Twitter!

~horo-scopes by @larainnepasion helps you learn about JavaScript...scopes

~scattatle by @darzhz is a particle simulator written with p5.js. Hitting "gravity" is very satisfying!

~sussyclicker by@PhpenixPythonCode is an Among Us clicker game 🧀

~owenwilsonwowmachine by@arianna1098765, creator of the previously featured Ryan Reynold’s hair color selector.

~only-exclamations by @samplereality is a remix of ~only-the-questions - guess which punctuation it isolates...

~livecodera by @flordefuego + @jcbcb is an awesome event page for a Women’s Day event.

~bpm-timer by @Pomax is a really cool and visual bpm timer!

~verbose-reflective-recorder by@decoded-cipher is a Morse code converter, with audio player too.

~worst-wordle by @MarkGamed is Wordle but with a slider. Mark is right, this may actually be the Worst Wordle!

~lingdle by @r0 is a Wordle clone for guessing the language based on given text

We’re collecting all of the WILDLY popular K-pop heardle clones here. 

It all started with ~heardle-kpop by@tanhuynh226 which is one of the most widely shared Glitch apps so far this year!

If you’re looking for generative art, @EricEisaman has a few here 🖼.

@DaniGatunes put together this really cool playlist of their Three.js work!

Use basic concepts in A-frame to create VR environments using these A-frame exercises.

Check out this playlist of p5.js projection mapping examples!

Hopefully, something here made you wonder, smile, chuckle, or sparked a new idea. ✨ We can’t wait to see what you do next! As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~under-water-animal-sounds, an aquatic soundboard created by several #100devs students. So that’s what seahorses sound like. 🤔

They say March “comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb.” But the Glitch community is worldwide and knows no seasons, so we say March 2022 came in like a blobby duderino and went out like non-stop K-pop Heardle clones.

Last month on Glitch, the March 2022 edition

Hello there, and welcome to the latest edition of the Last month on Glitch recap, written to you from the—gasp!—third month of 2022. Although it shouldn’t actually be shocking when February goes by so fast, it’s the shortest month of the year. But here we are, with another month’s worth of creative, intriguing, and delightful developments made by you, the Glitch community! 

Before we get to that, we need to quickly shout out some of the things we think could be useful to you in your next project. Last month, we teamed up with DigitalOcean to add a “deploy to DO” button to the Glitch editor. Also, we’re getting ready to announce an update for those of you who signed up for Fastly’s Compute@Edge on Glitch beta. Not on the list yet? There’s still time to sign up! 

~shimmering-planet-metacarpal by @kenneth.kufluk is a voice-activated multiplication quiz

𝓌ℯ 𝓁ℴ𝓋ℯ 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓈 𝓉ℯ𝓍𝓉 𝓉𝓇𝒶𝓃𝓈𝒻ℴ𝓇𝓂ℯ𝓇, a.k.a. ~text-transformer by @pts

~jupyter-lite by @EricEisaman brings Jupyter Lite into Glitch

~speech-paragraph by @tomayac is a demo of Danny Moerkerke’s speech-paragraph custom element that “extends the native paragraph HTML element <p> and enables it to read its text out loud using Web SpeechSynthesis.”

~next-slide-please by @aTylerRobertson is a presenter-controlled slide app!

~epb by @emmettbaber is a cool link-in-bio app using A-Frame.

~digital-pottery by @high_byte is an app we’ve shared before, but it came up again on Twitter!

~multiuser-blocks by @pschroen is a really cool 3D multi-user “room” where you can throw around 3d objects.

And if you’re new to A-Frame, read more at glitch.com/webxr. Also, we love these A-Frame and WebXR playlists from @fcor, so be sure to check them out!

~rainbowfishdraw by @bscott711 is a remix of ~fishdraw but with colors and movement

~i-love-dotdotdot by @loganwilliams is a generative poem that pulls live content from Twitter (so beware of NSFW content! ☠️)

~efficacious-sudden-smoke by @jetsuko is a very clever Street Fighter arcade sim using Youtube I-Frames.

~a-slaty-in-a-gullstack by @blprnt lets you “live the experience of looking for one gull among thousands of nearly identical gulls in your browser!”

~neighborly-like-feels by @joshi22amit is a two-player dice rolling game

~rrhaircolorselector by @arianna1098765 lets you choose different hair colors for Ryan Reynolds lol

~azure-sunny-elbow by @evanbindz, named GlitchWiki, is a recreation of MediaWiki on Glitch!

~townscaper-dataviz by @pomeranian99 lets you turn data into pretty towns!

~truth-exuberant-wave by @krystenchenoweth is a collection of pomodoro sessions on Youtube. 

~bad-bridges by @ohheyitsrainy was created to map out the bridges of Pittsburgh and how structurally sound (or not) they are. You can learn more and hear from its creator in this article from Pittsburgh CityPaper about it!

~liars-wordle by @Radcliffe is Wordle on Hardcore Mode. Give them some love on the forum if you play and enjoy it!

It’s a Wordle World now, friends and we’re just living in it. Check out our playlist of Wordle clones, after you take a look at a few of our faves from this month. 

Speaking of faves, ~favle by @aTylerRobertson is Wordle in the favicon!

~trainle by @WheresAlice for UK train codes

~broadcastle by @johntcolucci is for the local news words

~worlde-word-game by @mapsmania uses countries and cities

~equinox-fast-balmoral by @AlisonStevens has you guess chord progressions!

Fun fact, 20+ of the links in this Wordles of the world are Glitch apps!

~braginator by @StuartHoughton85754 is an emoji wordle brag generator

~wordle-art by @pau-tomas lets you draw your own wordle brag!

~wordleshares by @thisismattmiller shows a distribution of wordle shares (We’ve been calling them brags, respectfully and lovingly).

~ringle by@AlisonStevens is a changeringing version of Wordle. We really admire Alison’s ability to connect such an old, “non-technical” activity to her app development.

~rewordle by @chigozienri lets you go back in Wordle time, if you dare. 

So there you have it, another month of projects that make folks think, laugh, or smile; keep up the good work, friends! As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup! ✨

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~draggy-box by @christianp which looks like a layout demo but is actually a really elegantly made game! They also made https://glitch.com/~rectangle-pals, a cool screensaver-like app. 

Hello there, and welcome to the latest edition of the Last month on Glitch recap, written to you from the—gasp!—third month of 2022.