About Kanoogi
Kanoogi is a cloud based gaming platform that runs in a browser.
Kanoogi's mission statement is to deliver games to billions of players globally - in a matter of seconds. Not only should a game be playable on virtually any modern web enabled device, it should be playable in regions of the world where it is hard to find high speed internet.
Though Kanoogi was originally meant to just support Intergalactic Space Empire, it has been designed and architected to support a wide range of games and interactive experiences.
History
The Kanoogi story originates about 10 years ago, when I first started looking into how viable it would be to create a compelling game experience in a web browser. Although I was often pleasantly surprised by how much capability the various available browsers had, most notable among them, Google's Chrome, there still wasn't quite enough overall compatibility across all of them to make a case for it. However, I did do some experiments and even created what I called "The Infinite Desktop", which was this desktop like space (that was virtually infinite) that you could populate with specially designed applications. If you launched one, it stayed launched, right where you put it. If you closed your browser, came back a month later, it was right there, happily waiting for you. What made this even more interesting was that you could connect them, feeding the output of one into an input of another. All this was done visually, so it was not only powerful, but also fun to do. I didn't quite have enough resources to explore it further, but I learned a lot of lessons from it in the process.
Around Oct 2016 I knew it was time to try something new. As much as I enjoyed my time at GPG and Wargaming, I had this itch to create something fun and simple, returning to my roots of game development. In the beginning of my career, working on games like Hardball II and Total Annihilation, I played a significant role in writing code that powered a game, but as those years wore on, I did less and less. Looking back even further, I started coding on my TRS-80 when I was 14, so it was a huge part of my life, and in short, I really missed doing it. I think writing code is fun, rewarding and intellectually stimulating, so as I say, it was time to move on and do what I had a yearning to do. I have to also mention that making games inside large studios was becoming less and less compelling, not the least of which was a tug of war between the business and the art of game making.
After taking some time off, I cleared my mind and started working on the design for Intergalactic Space Empire, and though I wasn't entirely convinced it would run in a browser, I started heading in that direction. The idea that something could be played on almost any device in the world was a pretty compelling reason to explore it. I picked up my work researching the technical capabilities, which included how performant Javascript had become (word was, the V8 engine had taken JS to a whole new level of performance), how compatible browers had become, and what a potential server stack would look like (I had used PHP for The Infinite Desktop, but I knew that wasn't going to cut it). My brain exploded when I realized how many languages, systems, architectures and packages existed for building things in a web browser and in the cloud. I started sifting through it all, and came to realize the best path through it all, given that I wanted to build a highly performant gaming system, was to create most of it myself. Some would say this is insane, but heck, if you want to make something go fast, which is often a top requirement of game development, you have to embrace this reality.
I started writing code, and soon enough saw that most of what I'm doing would not only work for my new space game, but for a huge number of games. This is when Kanoogi as a platform became a critical part of the vision. I didn't need to shift any additional resources (which is mostly my time) into the platform, as my strategy was to just develop what I needed to support Intergalactic Space Empire, and I could come back later to build out any other required systems and services. This would mean that I'd need to take a little extra time to make some higher level architectural decisions, which seemed reasonable enough. So, moving ahead, work continues on IGSE, and as a part of that, the Kanoogi platform.
That's the Kanoogi story so far... the first chapter of many as the adventure continues.
Chris Taylor
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