TileGamer for the XO Laptop

Upon reading the "Praise for Three Cups of Tea" (what reviewers wrote about that book, all positive of course), I was inspired to make TileGamer compatible with the XO Laptop (a $175 laptop for schoolchildren in developing countries, manufactured by One Laptop Per Child, or OLPC). So the game editor will be written in Python, not Java (the game server will be written in Java). The game editor for the XO will syntax-check the game designer's Treescript code (the built-in scripting language of TileGamer), and then translate it into Python (the main programming language of the XO). The game editor for other computers (Windows, Linux, or Mac) compiles the Treescript code into Tilegamer Intermediate Language (TIL), which is loaded into memory into a data structure called a tree, and executed. A separate utility associated with the game editor is a cross-compiler which translates Treescript into a Java applet source file. The game designer uploads the Java applet, which is automatically compiled into Java byte code on the server so that anyone can play that game in their web browsers.

Three Cups of Tea is a book about a mountaineer who fails to climb K2 and finds himself in a remote village. In order to thank the people in the village who rescued him, he promises to build them a school. Eventually he builds over 50 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. That inspired me to make TileGamer.com a non-profit organization. I want to help schoolchildren in developing countries learn how to program computers, by creating multiplayer games on their XO Laptops. Let's face it, the likelihood that some big company like Google will someday give me 100 million dollars to buy TileGamer.com is very close to zero. The business model will be the VIP user model, where everyone can play/create games for free, but VIP users, who pay subscription fees, get extra perks (and I can guilt people into joining as VIP users, since TileGamer.com helps schoolchildren in the third world).

The first step in TileGamer development will be to finish the documentation in my web site, for members of the OLPC development community. Then I must download Project Darkstar (PDS), and a game called Hack which runs on top of PDS. Then I must begin development on the game server (based on PDS), using Java. Then I must approach the OLPC community, advertising my TileGamer project (a long time ago I told them about Treenimation, an older version of TileGamer). After I get the game server working, the next step is to develop the game editor in Python. Maybe I can recruit other OLPC developers to help me do that.