When Glitch was canceled, it crushed the hearts and dreams of those few who knew, understood, and loved the game. Since its downfall, the quirky browser game has grown a cult following and even (tiny) sparked two attempted revivals. Today we’re talking with Kaiyon Alatar on how Eleven will bring back Glitch’s world — just perhaps in a new way.
Join us after the jump as we talk with Alatar about Eleven’s progress, how it differs from Children of Ur, and what you can do to help!
Massively OP: Can you bring us up to speed on the progress of Eleven?
Kaiyon Alatar: Regarding in-game features, we have most everything functional (although player-customizable housing and group/player instanced locations aren’t available in the alpha yet). We’re diligently working on some of the architectural issues right now and have a potential improvement being tested by the team to determine readiness for rolling it out to alpha. Our primary goal right now is to improve the stability and scalability to the point where we can start letting more people play.
How much of Glitch’s assets are you repurposing for the project?
All of them! Well, all of the ones they released open source. The flash based client was provided in its entirety, so we’ve only needed minimal tweaks there in order to change the logo and a couple other minor details. The back end has required a bit more tweaking in order to be compatible with the framework we’re building around it, but it’s still basically the same.
How does Eleven differ from Children of Ur?
While we’re both trying to revive the essence of Glitch, we’re going down two completely different paths to get there. Our friends over at Children of Ur actually got started first, before Tiny Speck (now Slack) released the assets, building up a completely new game from scratch. Once the assets were released, they were able to take advantage of them in order to make their game a lot closer to Glitch while another group of fans got started on what is now Eleven.
The Eleven project path is to build everything up from the source code (and artwork) released by Tiny Speck. This has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that the Eleven project will have a closer-to-the-original game up sooner, the disadvantage is being stuck with the original technology, at least for the time being.
Is there a time frame for public alpha or beta testing?
While I’d love to give a date, the fact that we’re made up entirely of volunteers working in their free time makes that next to impossible until we get a lot closer. The best I can say is, “As quickly as we can.”
Are you looking for volunteers to assist in the project? Is there any way the community can help?
We’re always looking for new team members! Right now our primary needs center around coding, so people with a background in JavaScript (required), Node/IO.js (useful, but not required) and/or PHP (specifically the Laravel framework) and enough free time to make a contribution (at least a couple hours a week for at least a few weeks at a time) are more than welcome, and they can contact us at slack@elevengiants.com.
As far as the community in general is concerned, just keep the spirit of Glitch alive while we build up your new home. If you haven’t done so, sign up on our website to lock down your username and talk to some of your old (or new) friends on the forums (that’s also the primary place we look for alpha players from so…).
What do you envision the final product looking like?
We realized early on that a static game couldn’t survive; once we move past the reverse-engineering stage, we would like to evolve the game’s story into the Thirteenth Age (and beyond?), with full respect for our beginnings. There were several unreleased features we are hoping to implement, along with some new ideas, too. Our intention is for the user experience to look and feel exactly like Glitch, with all the original stories, quests, and interactions with the environment.
In what ways will Eleven differ from Glitch?
The supporting webapp was not released with the source code, so we have to rebuild that from scratch. The user profiles, auctions, skills, and vanity/wardrobe, etc will have a fresh new look, while serving the same core functions. The forum software in Glitch was custom-written by Tiny Speck, so while we haven’t currently taken on that particular challenge, there is scope to code our own, or fully embed our implementation of Vanilla Forums into the app. As I stated in the previous reply, we intend to add content to Eleven so we can continue this journey both as developers and players; while that is a “difference”, it’s also a necessary one to maintain user interest.
Thanks for sharing this with us!
