Development Itinerary for April/May 2019

I talked a little bit about my development plans on stream, but in case you missed it, here's a recap with less word jumbling.

What's already done:

• ✔️PHP implementation of dhole-cryptography 
• ✔️Fixed the ABI issues with elgato-stream-deck and electron 
• ✔️Improved the build scripts for fursona-sticker-switcher to precompile node-hid for Windows and Mac
• ✔️ Fixed a weird quirk with GIFs in StreamLabs OBS by using the real path on the filesystem when studying file extensions. My fix should land in version 0.13.0, whenever that's released.

The end result of this effort is that, soon, if you own an Elgato Stream Deck, you'll be able to control the Fursona Sticker Switcher with it.

What's Next for Soatok's Twitch Channel

In the immediate future, I plan on rewriting dhole-cryptography in JavaScript, for use in Node.js apps. This will be my first 100% async (and promise-based) JS library, so it should be fun to develop.

In a totally different direction, my next project after the Fursona Sticker Switcher is stable will be a video game! I didn't go into too many details during the stream, so I won't here, but it's going to be (at least initially) a single-player game.

If it's well-received upon completion, I may add a multiplayer component (e.g. PvP dueling). This will require network programming and cryptography, which circles back to the dhole-cryptography library. I'm going to need to port this over to Game Maker Studio 2, which means doing one of two things:

1. Figuring out how to use FFI with GM2 (i.e.  load libsodium.dll/.so into the game as a dependency and call functions)

2. Port TweetNaCl, BLAKE2b, and Ed25519 to GM2's code and open source it as a separate library.

At this point I should remind everyone that you shouldn't roll your own crypto. In this sense, I'm actually a trained professional outside the fandom, but you should still view any crypto code I write with at least mild skepticism, no matter how good it appears to be at face value. Mistakes can happen.

That being said, I plan on open sourcing my Game Maker 2 version of dhole-cryptography as a separate GitHub project, under a permissive license (e.g. ISC) so other game developers can use it in their own projects.

My hope is that I can save you from having to reason about Bleichenbacher's RSA attacks when developing games for your friends and fans. (They're fun for me! But not for most people.)

So that's where things stand. I'll be making more announcements about the video game once I've finished trimming down my brainstorm list and have something that everyone will, hopefully, find fun and intuitive.

P.S. Also, in case it wasn't obvious: all of the characters in the game will be furries. Furries improve everything! <3