Twinkle originated as a fun and unique project of mine and was originally build for the #audiogamejam. It was a pretty ambitious project designed to use Sound as the only medium to play the game. The game featured no text, no UI and it’s only graphical element was a single additive shader.

The game is one of my favorites. Not only because of it’s ambition but because despite its flaws it works and frankly, it’s fun. Another really interesting point for me was the fact that Twinkle was one of the first videos on my YouTube channel which, at the time was only a few weeks old. The complete development of Twinkle was recorded and made available on my YouTube channel. That was a time back when I loathed the sound of my own voice and was still figuring things out. Granted, that last point hasn’t changed. Still learning, as ever, but the videos at the time were… beta. I liked that.

Beyond this Twinkle was the first game I have ever made that tapped into the community. The project includes a full (poorly written) ASP.NET web service that means all the creations made in the game can be shared across the world. This feature was one of the ones that I really wanted to focus on for this game and the one that really made the game stand out. Collaboration was required in order to play the game to the maximum. New sounds had to be discovered and other players creations modified. It truly was, is, a dynamic world of sound build by you. That was super fun to build.

However, the servers are why I’m writing. I do not have a persistent server at my home and currently Twinkle’s server is hosted out on Microsoft Azure. That’s great because it means I don’t have to maintain servers and can more or less just let it run. The bad news is it isn’t free. It doesn’t cost much, but it doesn’t make sense to bleed money especially considering the next point.

Nobody really played Twinkle. Twinkle was one of my most experimental games. More experimental than Reality my #AsylumJam2015 entry. That’s saying something. A lot of somethings honestly.

So. What’s the point of this? The short version is I’m going to be shutting down Twinkle’s online server (unless something significant changes) at the end of the year. If you want, the game is open source so you can spin up your own copy of the game server and run with that. Even modify it, add sounds etc.

The complete source for the game is available for this project and can be found here.

In the end Twinkle was a great experiment, but it needed something more. I don’t know what that is. Maybe time? Maybe it just needed to be something else. I have no idea.

If I can I’ll put out an update for offline play, maybe procedural worlds as well (that was a stretch goal during the game jam). Who knows? I don’t and I made the thing. :)

Either way, until next time Internet!
Cya, Runewake2