Goblin Shark

Goblin Shark is my build service for Pogona, the world-authoring tool I use to write choose-your-own-adventure and small graphical games — a clean seam between authoring a game and playing it.

It takes a world definition, validates it, compiles it into a versioned, immutable game file, drops it in blob storage, and announces the build over Kafka so it shows up in my game catalogue. It started as a compiler for text adventures and has grown to package labyrinth crawlers and chess matches too, all served back to the browser as small WebAssembly game runners.

Goblin Shark is my build service for Pogona, the world-authoring tool I use to write “choose your own adventure” games and small graphical games of my own. I wanted a clean seam between authoring a game (scenes, options, rosters, items) and playing it, so Goblin Shark takes a world definition, validates it, compiles it into a versioned, immutable game file, and drops it in blob storage — then announces the build over Kafka so it can show up in my game catalog. It started as a compiler for text-adventure games and has grown to package labyrinth crawlers and chess matches too, all served back out to a browser as small WebAssembly game runners.