Creating Games to Make the Web Fun Again - Nolen Royalty

Nolan Royalty discusses his journey in game development, reflecting on the nostalgia of early internet games and the communities they fostered. He shares insights on unique game concepts like 1 million Check Boxes and Pack cam, and the creative process behind designing engaging games. Nolan highlights the challenges of monetization and the importance of experimentation for aspiring creators in today's landscape.

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Transcript

Welcome back to another coffee with developers today. I'm really excited to have known royalty here. Not because royal guests are a great thing, but if you don't know about him, he's basically, he is EIEIO Games. And that's from the old McDonald's, right? I do that, right?
Or. Yeah, it was my sister's first word and it happened to be the name I used on the Internet 20 years ago. And I've kept it cool because, I mean, I always think like when I introduce people on stage and their job title is cio, that's always what's playing in my headio. Cio. Yeah.
And it's not a good thing because most of the time they're important people. So what Nolan does, not for a living, I think, but as something just to make people like me happy is things like that. If I share the screen right now, you can see that here's some of the work that Nolan has done. And it's games, little games running in the browser and running in other parts. And they have a 2000 spirit.
We just talked about that off screen a bit that like I Remember in the 2000s Flash came out and people just wrote silly games and put them online. There were allle like newgrounds and there were all like forums around that. Like there were whole communities around that and we kind of lost that. We just basically. A few hard corre people still do it like beta.com and these environments.
But a lot of people have lost their joy of the Internet just to play something and to build something silly. And I think you can learn a lot from building little games that actually later on this technologies that you didn't know. So the one thing that made you famous lately was the 1 million checkboxes, which also got picked up by the New York Times, but not bought by the New York Times like other games did then. The Pac Cam was something I really, really liked, where you have to move your head and jump on things like your Pac man break time is that breakout inside a calendar where you can shoot the meetings that you don't want to have, which is really, really rewarding. Stranger Video is a blinking game on the Internet.
You could connect it to somebody else and the first one who blinks loses and lots and lots of others. There's Doom in the photos app and like Firefox is Autocomplete in the awesome bar. I worked on that one when I worked in Firefox, so I really like that one. There's Wordle and the Autocomplete thing here. So these are the bits that you do.
So the first question that I kind of have, like, why is it just like to try things out? Like, I'm very happy that you do, but it's not a normal thing to do for people nowadays, is it? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I definitely like why. I guess there's two different whys there.
There's like, why do I make games at all? And why do I make things that are pretty bizarre? And the second ones may be easier for me to talk about. The answer is that when I started doing this, I made much more normal games, like games that you uploaded to like it IO, which is, I think, the closest that you can get to like a Congregate or newgrand style Flash site for, I don't know, games that run in the browser. I know that those sites are still around, but I think that's where a lot of people go.
So I uploaded kind of much more normal games when I started doing this about a year and a half ago and pretty quickly found that one, I didn't like it that much and two, I wasn't that good at it. Like, the games I was making were not that compelling. And in the middle of last year I made the Firefox game that you mentioned. It's like Worirdle running in the Firefox address bar by abusing Autocomplete. And I found that, one, that was a lot more fun for me, and two, that was a lot more fun for other people.
People found that more compelling and more interesting. And that kind of set me on the path towards like, oh, like I'm happier and other people are happier when I make these weird things. I did that while I was at a thing called Recursse center, which is kind of like a writer's retreat for programmers in Brooklyn. So I was around a lot of people that were giving me a lot of feedback about what it was that I was making, which. Which was really helpful for kind of zeroing in on what I wanted to do in terms of why I do this more broadly.
I can't help myself. It's really fun. I really enjoy it. I definitely grew up on Flash games in particular. For whatever reason, I was really stuck on Congregate, not Newgrounds, but I really, really liked playing games like that.
I really, I don't know, I feel like I kind of grew up on the Internet and I grew up on a very good version of the Internet, a very fun version, where I think in particular, one thing I'THOUGHT about a lot is how like, going online doesn't mean the same thing that it used to. Like, we're so online now. The Internet is such a thing that, like, going online is just like participating in society. And I think that wasn't true, like, 15 years ago or something. Like, the Internet was its own thing and you could kind of go on most of the stuff on there was stuff that people thought was like, cool, compelling, interesting.
Maybe we hadn't zeroed in on how you could make a lot of money by making websites. And so that wasn't the default thing that people did. I started making games because I. Well, I've worked in tech for a long time, and back in 2022, I decided to stop doing that. Iided to quit my job.
I was working in finance and the plan was to build games for a bit to kind of rediscover my love of programming and making things. I kind of moved into management and then I figured I would, like, start a company or something. And then I started making games and was like, wait, I like this a lot. Like, what? What if I do this?
And I had kind of saved up some money to kind of pursue whatever my dreams were. So in the, in the short term and still, you know, my goal wasn't like, oh, how do I make a game and then like, sell it to the New York Times, as you joked about, or whatever. It was just kind of like, let's make some things for fun. And now I'm kind of, I guess, at a high level trying to figure out what that means for my future job prospects. But I'm having a lot of fun.
It's just really great. I love making things. And the feeling of making a thing that is kind of pure in this way, kind of divorced from ads, divorced from monetization that people can just enjoy is just like, it's really special. And, and I, I thought about this a lot with 1 million checkboxes where, like, I could have run ads, I got a lot of offers to run ads, but I think that I would have lost a lot by kind of modernizing it in that way and getting to keep it as like, no, this is going to be a time capsule of what I really loved about the Internet. Felt really good.
Well, I mean, there's two sides to the story as well. I mean, I remember Wordle was out for years and nobody knew about it. He built his first girlfriend or something, and then basically all of a sudden somebody found it and it blossomed and then he got money for it and New York Times didn't Kill it. They kept it and they're clamping down on other games being called Worldled right now. I think there's a thing going on.
But on the other hand, Flappy Bird completely overwhelmed the developer and he basically, he took it off the market and said like he can't deal with it anymore. So dealing with that immediate success, I think is also a learning that you have to do from that. And I'm very happy that yours has moderate success. But not everything is becoming like in the news in the evening and you get like thousands of requests of selling it. So I think the middle ground there, the newound finding these things quite, is quite a good thing to have.
Now before we go into the others, one are the things that I really enjoyed about the 1 million checkboxes. I mean if people it. It was basically a multiplayer checkboxing Chex and Unclick basically against each other. And you found something weird in there that made you really, really happy because you thought you'd been hacked, but it wasn't. So can you enlighten us what that was?
Because I was just blown away by that as well, because I didn't expect it from a generation of developers nowadays doing that. Yeah. Okay. So at a very high level, 1 million checkboxes was a website with million checkboxes on it, which is pretty obvious from the name. And the bit, as he said, was that they were global.
So checking or unchecking a box checked or unchecked it for everybody in the world immediately. And it was kind of bizarrely popular. There were, you know, half a million players within like 2 days after launchunch. It was totally crazy, but a couple of days in I found this crazy thing and basically a tiny bit of context for you. Two tiny bits of context.
One is that the way that I stored data matters here. And it'snn be. It's gonna seem weird that I'm talking about this if you don't know where I'm going, but I stored my data as a big binary blob. So millions, a big number, wanted to store a million bits of information quickly. And what I did was stored literally a million bits, right?
Checkbox is checked or unchecked. That's just like a bit, which is 0 or 1. So I had a big database that just had a million bits in it. Second thing, very briefly, I was really worried when I made this, as I often am with kind of social experiment games about people drawing stuff on it, right? One problem you can have on the Internet, if you let people draw Things on the Internet, there are a couple of things that they pretty consistently draw.
You know what I'm talking about? And so I did a couple of things to prevent that. The big one was that I made the number of checkboxes that you could see scale to the size of your browser, instead of being like a panable infinite canvas, like Reddit's Place, which was actually made by the guy who made wordle. Fun fact, but this way, if you drew something on your phone, it wouldn't show up for me on my laptop because the checkboxes would be arranged differently. So a couple days, and I dump that database, I look at the raw binary bytes that I have in the database, and I don't know why I did this.
I was exhausted. But I was expecting it to just be total nonsense. I was, like, looking at it, an ASCII that really shouldn't be anything. And instead of being nonsense, at the end of it, I saw this repeating URL that said was like, CatGirls win OMCB, which is an insane thing to see here, right? There's no way that it's a coincidence if you see it once.
And I didn't see it once. They thought like 500 times. And I panicked. I freaked out. I assumed I had been hacked.
I'm not really a web developer. I thought I had, liked, done something wrong, but instead I realized that people were checking and unchecking these boxes on the site to make it so that the binary representation of that data formed this URL. And I clicked a URL. I joined it, and what I found was that it was a link to a discord full of teams that had gotten really into botting the website. And what they were doing was I had tried to make it hard for them to draw, but they were like, well, a thousand times, one thousand is a million.
We'll just pretend that this is a thousand by thousand canvas and we'll, like, draw images to that. So they were drawing images there and they were writing this binary message to attract other people like them who would be looking at this data to kind of come to the discord and, like, chat about what they were doing, chat about botting the site. And they started drawing all sorts of crazy things. They put, like, Rick Rolls on there, all sorts of things. I just.
I thought this was so cool. It reminded me of the type of stuff that I got up to as a kid. I did all sorts of, like, silly things on the computer. And I found it, I think, particularly moving and exciting because I got to see what they were doing in real time and, like, respond with encouragement instead of kind of responding with like anger, being like, hey, knock it off, Stop botting my website, you're crashing it. I was just like, so proud of them for doing what they were doing.
And honestly, really proud to have made something that people that smart, I think, like, they're just brilliant. They're these like, you know, teenagers that just know so much about computers, make something that they thought was worth their time, was just so exciting to me. So, so that's the story. Images and then basically use developer tools to uncheck them, uncheck them automatically to them to check the right things in there. Or they couldn't have done it by hand because that's not.
They didn't do it by hand. They wrot bo. So I had a pretty easy to use API. Not like, because I was thinking about developers, just because, like, I'm a developer and I wanted a nice little API. And they wrote like command line bots that had hooks into that API.
So they would run their bot, they would tell their bot like, hey, this is the image I want to draw to this imaginary thousand by thousand canvas. And it would take that image, it would convert it into black and white, and it would determine like, oh, this is. These are the boxes that need to be checked and unchecked to form this image. And then they would listen to all the updates that came in from my site, which I made very easy to do. And whenever an update happened that checked or unchecked a box that they didn't want checked or unchecked, they would just revert that.
They would send me a message being like, no, no, no, check that again. And they would just run these bots all the time. And it was actually really cool. It became popular enough to bot the site that bots would start fighting over territory. Like two people were trying to draw different images in the same spot.
And I did have some rate limits in place, but they'd just be going back and forth checking and unchecking things. At one point I had a big bug in my rate limiting logic. And it was like I tried to make it harder to check more things the faster you were going, but instead if you checked fast enough, you got mor leeway the faster you were going. And so two people wrote really fast bots and just kind of like repeatedly crashed the site because they were sending like 10,000 updates a second or whatever, which was really silly. I love that because, I mean, I used to do that with Flash games.
I remember when Flash games Then became very commercial and became like competitions online. They never check the URL that goes in. So you basically you just posted with Carl from the command line and you won the thing by giving yourself a million points and never a million because that was too obvious. So you gave it like a really high number. So then you're basically, you won the thing without ever having to play the game.
Soeah. The idea flashback then the danger was that everything looked so contained that people thought you couldn't access it from the outside, but it was still with a URL being loaded and the parameters going into it. So it was a very silly, interesting thing to make that happen. And you always find people that are just trying to. I worked for Yahoo and we had people accessing and trying to hack our systems every two seconds.
And sometimes they did it so cleverly that you just want to give them access for a while. Of course you can't. But I know Spotify back then when you try to actually intercept the MP3 player and download the MP3 and you didn't do it cleverly with a random timeout or something, they send you an HTTP header with a telephone number and saying like, hey, if you want to get a job here, you can also apply. And I think that's great, a great way of dealing with that to reward that creativity of people like that. It's interesting also they set up a discord.
I guess that's the new disposable bit to start talking with each other. Back then we used RC channels, but now it seems to be discord. Yeah, I think discord is kind of the place to be for, I don't know, kids approximately. But it's also, it's funny that you mentioned the like flash cheating thing. I remember seeing scores that I knew were, you know, cheating back in the day.
Like I remember this with. I was really into this game called Desktop Tower Defense years ago and the top scores a lot of the time were hacked and I kind of knew how to program, but not really and you know, certainly not at that level. And so the idea, like I just had no mental model of how you could cheat in that way. And then I didn't think about anything like that for years. And this kind of took me back to that.
Now of course I understand how things like that work and. And so it was very cool to see that and to also be like, oh wow, they were my. I was about their age when I was playing these games. I had no idea how to solve this problem. And they are like, they are so deep on this, they're so into it.
So yeah, it definitely takes me back to that which gives you so much hope. Caus we've been pushed into this consumer community of computers. Like people don't know how to repair machines any longer. They just get the new mobile phone. It's like people think you have to download an app for everything rather than just finding a website just to play with things and discard them when you don't need it anymore.
That doesn't need to be anything on your phone for eternity when you just want to play it once. I remember the other day I looked for Osmos, the game which I really loved to play on Android like years ago, and I completely vanished. There's like nowhere to get it any longer. And I was like old computer pirate me thinking there must be a pirateate copy somewhere and apk that I could still play. But.
But no. Things really come and go away and get taken away by business interests and I find that very depressing. And I find it really cool when I see that kids have this deviousness of playing with these things and setting up their own little environments where they could just chat with each other rather than just trying to win Twitter with it. So this is really nice to see as well. One thing I find interesting in your portfolio of things right now is that you go all over the shop.
I mean, like you have this in Google Calendar, which I think is written in like app script then or something. You got the video things where you talk with HTML5 APIs and you got. With the pac cam, you have like Poser, I think it was, or some facial recognition thing. Media. Yeah, and Flappy Dirt in macOS Finder.
So how much did you learn about these different environments by hacking them? Or is it something you had to do before them and went back to it? Or is it just like, hey, Finder, I can put Flappy Bird into that one. I am working on kind of a video about the approach that I take to things like that because I obviously I think about it a lot. It's one of my favorite things to do.
So it's a great question. I feel like I'm well ph positionian to answer it. I. In general, I don't know that much about the platform that I'm using before I jump into it. And that actually applies to the web stuff that I do as well.
I've been a software engineer for a very long time. I learned what Flexbox was earlier this year. I was not a web developer remotely and so even the Much more. Maybe normal web games that I've made like 1 million checkboxes. I've had to learn a lot about how the web works.
How do you only render things in view, whatever. But I think one of my favorite things about making things like this, embedding a game in a surprising spot, is how much you have to learn about that thing to make it. So normally what happens, and I think Flappy Bird or the Firefox game that I made are good examples of this, is that I notice some interesting feature. So with Flappy Bird, it was that folders in macOS Finder have a Date last modified timestamp or Date last open timestamp. Sorry.
And I wonder how that works. And normally these things are like, they have a little bit of interactivity built in, right? Like date last open that's going toa update if you open it. And that's maybe enough to make a game because really what you need for a game is for a way for a user to tell you what it is that they want to do and a way for you to respond to it. And so typically these things that I latch onto have that little bit of interactivity bu to.
But I noticed that and I look at how it works, I play with it in the Last Open thing. It kind of reminded me of a time on Linux, which is the last time that a file was accessed. And a time is really controversial because it's like something on the file system that you update. Every time you update the file system, it can really slow your system down. If you're running a server that's accessing lots of files and I investigate, and if it's kind of manipulatable in the way that I want it to be, I go really deep.
I'm like, okay, so like, how can I make this do exactly what it is that I want to do? How can I build an entire game that relies on like opening folders on MA os? How can I abuse the Open Search Spec, which has this suggestions feature to build a wordle? And it's one of my favorite ways to learn. I think, like, I am motivated there by, oh gosh, it's kind of hard to place why?
Like it produces such a fun story, I think is a lot of it. Like, I'm thinking about the blog that I'm gonna be able to write when I finish this. And I'm thinking about like explaining to people like, yeah, so then I was like abusing this feature to do this totally unrelated, insane thing and it didn't quite work. So I found this other feature that intersects with this in this really goofy way. And I like learning, but I like learning with a goal.
And this gives me this kind of cool, exciting, weird goal. So in general, don't know much about the technologies, but I end up knowing a lot about them by the end. So also, I guess, tapping into communities around it, like, where do you normally meet people when you get stuck that can help you with the problems that you have, which are normally quite far left of the normal playing field. But, like, where do you find help when you get stuck in those things? Yeah.
So it is funny. Yeah, the problems. And this is another one of my favorite things about this is the problems you run into here are so dumb, for a lack of a better word. It's like, well, yeah, you have this problem because, like, you're eight steps deep on doing things you're not supposed to do. Like, of course you're having a.
You know, like, with Flappy Bird, I was like, having problems. Refreshing. I was trying to run it more than two frames a second, and I was struggling to get Finder to run it more than two frames a second. And like, of course Finder can't run it more than two frames. It's like, it's macOS Finder.
Like, what are you doing? It's not made for running movies, but it's fun to have those problems. They're so silly. And when I started doing this, I didn't really have anywhere to turn. I had plenty of coworkers from previous jobs, but, like, they're busy doing work.
But by continuing to do this for. I've been at it for about a year and a half. I've met a lot of other folks that, even if they're not interested in exactly the same things, are at least kind of entertained by them. So I think I mentioned Reur center earlier, which is, again, kind of a writer's retreat for programming. That was probably the first place that I met a lot of people that were happy to entertain ideas like this.
And they helped me a lot with the flappffy Bird thing, where I was stuck on this, getting it to run it more than two frames a second. And I just kind of messaged the community, being like, anyone have any ideas about how to solve this? And these days, I still have that community as well as, like, lots of other folks that I know that are building fun stuff online. And I'll maybe message some people that I know have dealt with not necessarily a similar problem, but at least know a lot about the technology. Stack that I'm currently using being like, hey, you know anyone know a lot about like Google Calendar, DOM and how I can manipulate it?
Because I'm trying to do that right now. And I think again, the problems are kind of goofy enough that that's often enough to nerd snipe somebody into helping me out, which I appreciate. Yeah, I mean that's the thing. I just wrote an article about junior developers and learning things and just going immediately into Chat GPT or going into Coilot and getting the one true answer that I leave everybody upvoted on stack overflow and not finding the weird solutions, not finding the bits that actually seem wrong, but actually give you a good result as well. So I think there is an inherent need for developers when they start thinking about as developers to play, to actually just fail and try things out.
And I think our market has been so accelerated when it comes to professional development that there is no space for that. And I find that really sad because, I mean, when I think back, like I started 1996, I built my first website. I looked at that code the other day and I was like embarrassed to death. But it was the only thing we had back then. And later on, the amount of mistakes that I made and learned from them is just a very, very interesting way of learning.
And I think we're taking that away from people. I remember also mid 2000s, I worked at Yahoo. We had all these open hack days. We had like the hack days in the company every month. And nowadays like hack days are for people to add to their CV to actually win the thing for prize money rather than just like we do random stuff here.
And I think that randomness is just. I got so much joy out of that. And I still get so much joy out of this. I still pixel on a Commodore 64 for demo scene stuff. Nobody pays me money for that.
But it's actually so much fun to work with this old hardware. And I think that's something where I. Where I wonder. I mean, there's no price tag on that, but there's a happiness tag on that. It's very nice to hear that you found joy doing that and you're lucky because you had some money lying around to actually work on it.
How do you stop yourself from saying, like, okay, the next one I want to sell to the New York Times. How do you stop yourself from saying, I'm using this success now just to make money with random stuff again? Is it just. Yeah, that's need to. That's an interesting question.
And I should Say just on the note of kind of like LLM stuff, a fun thing about this, about a lot of the stuff I do is that the problems are weird enough that they're totally out of distribution for, for an LLM. And so you can ask it like how do I make find your faster or whatever. And it can't, you know, maybe it can offer some ideass are super powerful, but the problems are not ones that people have solved before. And so you kind of have to figure those things out for yourself, which is really fun in terms of kind of sticking with it and not, I don't know, looking for a way to monetize. I certainly, you know, if the New York Times had, and it's funny actually when, when they emailed me to interview me about 1 million checkboxes, I had just made a joke to another newspaper about selling it to the Times and they like sent me an email and then sent me a follow up being like, by the way, this is, I'm so sorry, this is not an offer to buy the game.
And I was like, okay, I appreciate that but I'm not like opposed to money. I'm not sure that would, I would have sold the game. I'm not sure that it would have made sense for an experience like 1 million checkboxes. But I'm certainly not going to default say no to any way to monetize any of this in any way. But I do think maybe a thing that helps here a lot is what I was doing before I was like, I was working in finance and it was really interesting in a lot of ways.
It was really great. Very smart people, cool problems, interesting problems, very close to money. Right. You know, you're working in a very kind of money adjacent field in a way that maybe if you're working at a startup that doesn't quite feel as true, right? Like, you're literally writing software that deals with money.
And so I got to think a lot back then about whether that was kind of the goal for me, whether that was something that I was going to prioritize. And nowadays I can ask myself whether, you know, is this like. Or I can kind of say, okay, if the goal was to, I don't know, make money again, if that was my goal, I have this option that I know that I like and it's going back to the job that I was doing, which is a good job and it paid well and that is an opportunity that is available to me. And how does it make me feel when I think about this monetization strategy? That I'm evaluating, like running ads on 1 million checkboxes.
And how does that compare to doing this other way of kind of going back to making money in a traditional way? And in general, that's kind of all I have to do. I kind of think about that, I think about how it would make me feel. And it's clear to me that right now the goal is building things that I love and I feel really good about and maybe a little change over time. I don't have Infinite Runway, but kind of the hope is that as long as I continue doing these things, the right opportunities will reveal themselves.
I've done some consulting and that's typically been around the same kind of weird set of skills that I've come up with. So can you trick an application into doing xyz because we want that for our app. That tends to feel pretty good to me. And I don't know, I'm optimistic that or I don't know, building things that people want to play seems like a harder problem than figuring out how to monetize them in the long term. And I'm optimistic that if I can solve the former, I will solve the latter in a way that feels really good to me.
I love that. Also, all successes, like runaway successes lately have become so basic. You know, like you got like flappy bird, you got like these kind of. You got like Wordle, you got yours. I mean there's like, I mean Minecraft, when I looked at it the first time, I'm like, wow, this has got to be a flash in the pan.
And then it became like an instructional thing and people built working CPUs inside Minecraft. Yeahah. That's just completely amazing what's going on there. And I think that's an interesting bit. One thing that I wondered about though, like how about traffic and how about paying for things?
Because I guess 1 million checkboxes had a lot of traffic. And your database. So did you scale that to some cloud thing or was it just at the cusp of breaking or falling over or how did that work out? It fell over a lot early. So I tend to kind of self host all of my stuff.
That's I think partially kind of an aestetic thing, but partially just kind of what I know. I know how to run servers. I did that a lot when. When I was kind of doing more traditional software engineering. I don't have a lot of practice using kind of the modern like, oh, we'll just like run your application for you.
And I do think that one way that viral traffic turns into a very large bill are those providers that make it really, really easy. My understanding is that there are a lot of places that in particular will really gouge you on bandwidth. And so it's really easy to spin up a viral site and then like, well, it's not easy to spin up a viral site, but you know what I mean? And then you wake up and you have a $10,000 bill because a bunch of people used your application. But if you weren't using the service, you have a $200 bill instead because they charge you a more reasonable rate for bandwidth.
So it was s running on DigitalOcean which has a pretty sane pricing for bandwidth. I made some early changes to kind of restrict that, cut down on my, the maximum amount of bandwidth that I would use. That was really important to me, being able to reason about what is the maximum cost that this is going to hit While I am sleeping, like I am watching this all day. I will know if things get really bad, but I cannot wake up to a five figure bill that would be, that would be bad. And as long as I had that and it was actually quite straightforward to make that not cap out at five figures but cap out at like the low three figures.
I felt pretty comfortable. And then it was actually a really interesting engineering challenge like how do I keep this running, serving all of this traffic without spending that much money? I think the final cost for 1 million checkboxes was something like $7 $ and there's a donation link on the site. People donated approximately that much. I can't remember if I broke even or made money or lost money, but if I made or lost money, it was in like the $50 range.
So really just not, not a particularly large amount of money either way. And that would have been true if I ran it forever. But one thing that I think does matter with kind of things like this is embracing kind of ephemerality. Like 1 million checkboxes ran for two weeks. And I was talking to people about a weekend about where my bills were and they thought they were crazy.
They were like, oh, if you take that and you multiply it by 365, like that's gonna be a really big number. And I was just like, well, it's not. I'm not gonna run this for 365 days. Like one, no one wants to check boxes for 365 days. That's not a thing.
That's people don't. But two, like't, I don't want to do that and I have the power to just say like it's over now. But other things that I make are static and if it's static I think there are a lot of good options for making something that is approximately free regardless of traffic. So that's another good option there. Well, I guess we also in a world where a lot of caching is much easier to do than it used to be, like HTTP 2 for starters has a lot of stuff built in and you can also the people's end users machines have a huge storage capability than the past.
We didn't have like I remember at one time I did a cookie rate where basically cookies could hold up to 8k and we basically split up an image into like 50 pieces and posted 50 cookies which of course was horrible because every HTTP request you get 50 cookies then. But it was the only way to store something on people's machines and nowadays that's so much easier to do. I like that timely bit that you say like it's a runaway success, great, we do it. And then I shut it down again because that's what it was. Because the other problem that we.
I mean when I saw it a 1 million checkboxes. Of course everybody's like oh that's like the pixel thing, selling a pixel for a dollar and that was a great idea. And then everybody tried to copy it and of course the copy completely failed. Like nobody does that all the time. It just, it's really interesting when something gets creative and then there's thousands of offshots of it.
I mean Flappy Bird had like, I think like 50, 60 of them on the Android Store at one time. So it's just very interesting to see how people copy those things and think the creative bit is coming from that one as well. But I love that. I mean it's the same with me like when I build things and then put it on GitHub and say like okay, I'm done with it. I just keep it there for prosperity.
And then people. Then I realized that GitHub Copilot and Chat CPT indexed it and it was the worst code I've ever written because it was just available with. So I think the bits on like also that the way you display it just on a blog, you know, like there's no like here's three buttons and subscribe to this and subscribe to that. I mean you got a newsletter but there's no. I think even showing ads on 1 million checkbox wouldn't even be possible because you cut it to the viewport of the device.
So showing an ad on that would have made that part not clickable. So that defeated the purpose of it. So it would have been very hard to add them without really degrading the experience in a meaningful way. For sure. It's fun that people donate to you.
I, I mean I spend about $150 on Patreon a month to support lots of different weird things on the Internet. And it's a shame that this is not a viable way of living. It seems like we always have to push if it's really. We don't have money to fall back on. You have to make horrible experiences for end users.
Do you feel like that there is a resurrection of that, that people start donating little bits of money, like to Buy Me a Coffee thing, whatever that company is called, seems to be working again because that was it back in the days in flash games. Also a big thing. You just had like sent money with PayPal and that was that. Yeah, I mean, I think it's hard. I think that the experience of A lot of the time, the way I think about it is like, if it was really easy for people to send me, you know, $0.05 when they liked something that I made.
And by really easy, I mean they didn't have to take out the credit card, like there was a button and they could press it and it worked 100% of the time across the whole Internet. I suspected that would help a lot. I think a challenge with Buy Me a Coffee is that like you have to go to another page and you know, type in some stuff and, and I mean I have one and I'm very grateful for it and it has made me some money. But I think one thing you see there is that there are sites. Patreon is a really good example and I think Substack is also like this where if you build enough of an ecosystem, then people already have their payment details there and then it's much more palatable for them to like click the little subscribe link and agree to send you, you know, $5 a month or something like that.
But like that, you know, at best that is a relatively small fraction of your users and you're not going to capture those people who, you know, maybe they don't want to spend $5, maybe that's a lot for them, but they would happily, you know, maybe they don't want a subscription. Right. Like, I think that's another really hard thing here is that a lot of those platforms that have had success or subscription based and maybe you don't want to subscribe to me. You've never heard of me before. But like, this was fun.
Like, yeah, I'll give this guy 5 cents. And so that is one thing that I kind of wish existed. And I think that's. That's a reason that people fall back on ads, is that it's kind of like that. Like you go to my.
Well, not my website, but you go to a website and you visit it and then you give them a microp peennny because you visited their website and you saw an ad and then the transaction is over. I think there's another challenge with subscriptions, which is that it gives the person who you have subscribed to kind of an obligation. If you subscribe to my Patreon, I don't have one, but if I had a Patreon, maybe you subscribe for a certain kind of content. Maybe you really liked 1 million checkboxes and you want me to build another multiplayer thing. And I don't want to do that right now.
That's not true necessarily. I actually would love to do that right now. But right. Like I am now kind of beholden to your own mental model of what it is that I deliver. And I think that's kind of challenging.
Or at least when I talk to other people that are doing similar things, that's something that comes up a lot that kind of stopps them from wanting to do this is like, oh, am I like kind of losing some creative control by promising to continue to do the things that made you want to subscribe to me in the first place? And I think that's a big challenge, right of kind of audience capture that takes a come out of it as well. Do you basically just. Then you're forced to do the fun, the thing that you had joy doing and then you're basically just, yeah, it's really not working that way. They used to be flatter.com which was done by the guys from behind Pirate Bay.
That one allowed you to say like, here's $20 a month, I put that in there. And then you could put like 10 penny there, 10p there, a dollar there, these kind of things. So you can separate it over the Internets with just a browser toolbar, I think it was. But yeah, kind of. They all really quickly went away.
This was great to see from you and we all should be looking forward. Forward to what else is coming from your direction. But there's no pressure because I really, really enjoy that you're just having fun with it rather than Just like, oh, I'm going to be the person that always creates cool stuff. You know, originally I meant to have another person on that who actually is on the beta community as well. And there does s a lot of games like once a week that are just random as well.
Didn't have time, sadly enough. So I'm going to interview him as well. Any advice you have for people out there that basically look into something that makes them happy right now in tech and their job isn't a part of it. How do you get started? How do you play with things?
Yeah, I mean, the best advice I have is you just got to make a lot of things. I think that is. And this comes up a lot with more traditional games where I think a very easy thing to do in like the traditional game space is you decide you want to make games and you think about your favorite game, which is this actually a huge game that took 50 people two years to make. And you're like, I'm going to make a game like that. And then you spend five years on it.
And it sucks because it's your first game and everyone's first game sucks. And that's totally fine. All my games were terrible when I started doing this. It's fine, don't worry about it. But it's very easy to kind of fall into that trap.
And instead you learn a lot by finishing a thing and shipping it and putting it on the Internet. And it's totally okay that, like, I don't know, it's your first thing and kind of getting that out from under you and getting your second thing and your fifth thing and your tenth thing out from under you. You just learn so much about how to make things, but also you learn a lot about your own taste. And I think that's what ends up mattering here is getting in touch with kind of the. It's, I don't know, kind of product market fit adjacent but for your own taste.
Like, what do you like doing? What do people like when you do and how can you do that as quickly as you can? So I think like making a bunch of stuff is really the big play there and you'll learn a lot about what it is that you like andnna do by doing that. And I mean, we've been never in a better place. I mean, if you just want to host it, use a GitHub page.
If you want to get started with playing game use H o. There's lots of just use. I mean, I've seen like games that taught you Flexbox for example, being hosted on codepad. Yeah. You know, I love that we have these platforms that just are.
They're not there for eternity, they're not there to actually make money, but they're there for you to start playing and be creative. As a creator, not even a developer, I think you can be a designer and come up with cool stuff and just use all the box things that put things together. There's lots of game engines out there that allow you to do gravity things that are really hard to do if you do it by hand. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for people to just play. And I want to thank you again for bringing this like early Internets fun back to people.
And hopefully a lot of people can learn from that or just get inspired by. Not necessarily learn. Yeah, yeah. Make more things. The Internet needs more silly little websites.
Thank you very much, Nolan. It was great to meet you. And that was copied with developers with Nolan royalty. We're gonna have more of him, I think soon. So if you got any questions for him, you can send him directly to EI Games or to us and we will shift them on.
Thanks. So thanks again and hopefully you had as much fun as we had. Yeah, this was a blast. Thanks for having me on.