Month: January 2014

Game Jams: Preparing for the best

Posted on by aaron

With the 2014 Global Game Jam fast approaching I have been asked a few times by new participants what they should take with them, and how they should prepare. Wikipedia defines a game jam as “a gathering of game developers for the purpose of planning, designing, and creating one or more games within a short span of time“, they are a wonderful experience for anyone interested in game development. They are often suited to any level of experience, as participants can form themselves into teams with total strangers of compatible skill-sets. Often people will volunteer to take a role that they know little about, experiencing a new side of the development process or polishing rarely used skills.

The Global Game Jam is a yearly event, taking place simultaneously around the world with a single theme given out to all participants. The event itself lasts for 48 hours, a very long time to be awake and developing, but a very short time to put a project together with a team of people you may have never met before! This makes it quite an exciting challenge that deserves at least a little preparation and planning! To that end I’m going to give you a few ideas and tips from my own experience. Ultimately a game jam is about being yourself, creating something, and having fun. There is no right and wrong, and it’s not a competition! Your experiences will vary, and my suggestions are only a rough guide. (Please note that none of the links in this post are affiliate links!)

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Firesafe: A Prophylactic For Firebase

Posted on by tom.larkworthy

Firesafe has just been developed and uploaded to github

Firesafe is a technology to enforce data integrity, and enable complex transactions, on Firebase.

Firesafe compiles hierarchical state machines (HSM) definitions into Firebase security rules. The Firesafe HSM language is expressive, and a super set of the Firebase security language. Adding consistent, concurrent and fail safe protocols to Firebase is now a whole lot simpler (e.g. cross-tree transactions).

Firebase is already the future of databases, offering scalable low latency database-as-a-servie. Firesafe, compliments this amazing technology with an expressive syntax to get the most out of its security model. (Firesafe is not endorsed by Firebase)

Motivation

In multiplayer apps/games, people cheat. It’s a loss of direct sales, AND the free loaders also diminish the fun for everyone else. Multiplayer games are webscale, which means the old solutions to data integrity and transactions don’t work (e.g. SQL).

Firebase solved one problem of the cost of providing low latency persistent data storage to mobile and desktop games. It’s the first scalable NoSQL hosted solution that didn’t suck. It also provided an unorthodox security and transactions abstraction. Turns out that abstraction has enough purchase to do some really cool things not possible in many NoSQL environments. Unfortunately, properly configuring the security layer is extremely verbose and error prone. Firesafe makes it easy.

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