I love the aha moment people get when they grasp a concept. It’s a lot of what gives me energy about this job. Being there to help people see how an abstract concept can make their concrete life better is amazingly rewarding.

Because of this, I try to change up all the parts of my talks, to make sure people feel like they’re going on a journey with me, ala Nancy Duarte in Resonate. I want you to feel like you’re on a trip with me, like we’re learning together, and exploring what interests you.

This game was born as a conference talk. It’s a longshot bet for a conference to accept a talk that has no set length, or pattern, that is entirely driven by audience participation, but several did, and I’m so grateful. The Toggle Game is an interactive exploration of how feature flagging can be used to make deployment safer and less of a big change.

Now I’ve taken the conference sketch and expanded it out into a playable game about an adorable space explorer, Toggle:

The Toggle Game

I built it in Twine. I’m saving the deep details of that for an OpenSource.com article, but the experience was pretty straightforward and quite enjoyable. You can find the source at https://github.com/wiredferret/Toggle. I’ve left in all my flaily and cranky commit messages for your enjoyment, because I like it when I can see an arc in other people’s commit messages.

In case you don’t want to play the game yourself, I have a video of how the people at DevOpsDays Toronto played it.