Project Canis

If you're a game developer (whether independent or part of a AAA company), Project Canis will make your life a lot easier.

What is Project Canis? I fleshed out its motivation and design on Twitch (and noodled with my Twitch chat over what to name it). If you'd rather watch the video on demand:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/414203797 (starts at 3:20)

The Problem Today

Whether you're working with RPG Maker, Game Maker Studio, Visual Novel Maker, or your own game engine, if you find yourself using a third-party script or resource, you're forced to manually check for updates (and then manually update them all).

This can get a little bit unwieldy if you have 200+ third-party scripts that you're using in your game projects.

The lack of a salient package manager for indie game devs has created needless friction and barriers to collaboration that I intend to tackle. Even the indie game devs that help other game devs on Twitch and YouTube are more siloed away from their community than they should be.

Project Canis is my idea to solve these problems. I want to make it easier for game devs to collaborate. I want to make it easier for people who rely on third-party scripts for special effects in their game projects to be able to stay up-to-date with the latest bug fixes without conscious effort.

Project Canis - Pack' Management for Star Developers

Project Canis is going to consist of two separate software projects: the canis-client and the canis-server.

canis-client

The client-side software will be a desktop application written in Electron that uses Dhole Cryptography to securely verify updates to third-party scripts and resources. It will allow you to select which canis-server instances to trust, search for and download specific versions of packages, and even provide tooling for packaging and signing your own scripts and resources for public consumption.

All packages will be signed with Dhole (that is to say, Ed25519). Any time a package version is released, a signing key is added or revoked, or an administrator redacts a resource (or version of resource) from public availability, these actions will be irreversibly committed to an append-only cryptographic ledger (with timestamps) to ensure complete administrator transparency and accountability.

For the non-cryptography engineers in the crowd, this means that anything that affects the security of the released files in any way will be signed and stamped. Good luck doing silent and targeted attacks with this in place.

canis-server

Not too much to say here. It'll be a JSON+REST API that only speaks over HTTPS, and contains a web UI for administrative users.

Project Roadmap

This week, I intend to get the canis-server ready to rock and roll. I'll be streaming Wednesday through Sunday most weeks, unless my job gets hectic.

Once we have a server instance nearly feature-complete, I'll start building the client sofware in Electron. I'll be extensively unit testing whatever I can on both components.

Both canis-client and canis-server will be developed while I stream on my Twitch channel.

The first usable version of this software should be ready for folks to experiment with in May 2019. 

Work on the Fursona Sticker Switcher will continue when I hear back from Elgato on whether or not they value open source contributions to their products' viability.