SketchJam: code with humans, for fun

I love creative coding. This is the way I got hooked into programming, with Processing and Arduino, and what got me was how short the loop is. You write a few lines, you look at the screen, something moved.

Small iterations and you see the result immediately. I think the shorter the loop between coding and seeing the result, the more satisfying it is. I did lots of creative coding projects over the years, and I even made a creative coding app for Android, PHONK out of frustrations with the early Android build process.

SketchJam

So I wanted to make something for exactly that: writing code by hand, with other humans, for no other reason than the fun of it.

The result is SketchJam, a sort of cadavre exquis played with code. Everybody starts from the same seed p5.js sketch, and you pass the pen:

One player types at a time, with everybody else watching the code change live.
Each turn has a clock and a character budget. When they run out, the sketch locks as it is.
There is no revert. Whatever you leave behind is what the next player has to work with.

I played it with people, and watching a small sketch morph into something nobody planned, turn after turn, is the whole reward. The clock and the character budget add just enough pressure to keep everybody leaning in.

Your turn: the clock running, the edit budget counting down, the room watching

At the end you can scrub the replay from the seed to the final frame, and a finished game can seed a new one, so games end up having ancestry.

The lobby: open games to join, and the wall of finished sketches

More than the game itself, that is what I am chasing here: making programming fun, so we humans can reconnect with coding as the art form it also is. Now that the machines write most of the serious code, maybe this is exactly the moment to get back to the playful side of it.