Kevin Carmody: machines, media & miscellanea

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Twon - many browsers light cycles

Last year’s jQuery conf was sponsored by BlackBerry and they gave away playbooks, loads of ‘em. This gave us an idea. Why not a game that ran across many of them? So we made a game that you can host and have multiple players join with their own device. You can also attach multiple screen together using hot areas so you can play across browsers across multiple computers. We called this game Twon… cause it’s kinda like Tron… kinda.

Naturally, the tech of choice was Node.js based sockets using Express. This allows some easy subscriptions to events across multiple devices.

Setting up the game is real easy. You can download the source at https://github.com/skinofstars/Twon, run npm install and then fire node app.js at it and you’ve got the Twon server up and running. Then, just visit the host machine with a few other browsers. You’ll see in the /public folder of the repo which pages to visit depending on what you’d like the browser to act as. We find projectors are great as arenas and mobiles as controllers.

Have fun!


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