iTabletop – an interview with Auldsofts’s James Auld

Article by: Morkalg

I love roleplaying games, I love creating characters, worlds, heinous plots and insidious ways to “kill” my friends. It’s a great release and is a wonderful way to flex my creative muscle which filters down into other areas of my life. The problem is though… I have a busy life. I’m a father of four, gainfully employed and at any given moment have a billion things to do so of course getting the time to game is a rare treat. In the past it never failed, when I was free nobody felt like coming over or were themselves very busy. Sometimes too, the weather was less than complimentary during the winter which was one more wrench in the works.

Recently however, I came across an application called iTabletop which has been able to save me time and get me into games with friends all over the internet. It’s really cool that I can upload maps, get sound files ready and queued up to play at the exact moment I need them, tie it in with our gaming blog site and even have communal  reference documents available via PDF’s for anyone in the game to look at whenever they need it!  Since we can get together online we save travel time and in a lot of ways the game seems more focused on the game as there are fewer distractions with everyone milling around. We still have very fluid interactions with each other because the system has built in audio and video capabilities as well as the obligatory chat sessions so there is still the feel of having real people playing in the game.
I wanted to talk to James Auld the creator of iTabletop to get some more information on how it all works and to find out where it’s all heading down the road.

Morkalg: Tell us what a VTT is and how is it used? 

James: Well, VTT stands for Virtual Tabletop. It's a program that allows you to play tabletop games with other people, over the Internet. Usually this term is used to refer to playing pen and paper RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons or World of Darkness online with your group of players.

Now as far as how people see the VTT, there are a lot of different ways to look at it. Some VTTs contain the complex rule-sets to various games and allow the Game Master (the person running the game) to elaborately setup the game, and the program then automates many aspects of play. Other VTTs take a simpler approach, and give the Game Master and players the tools to plunk a map on the screen, add tokens to it, move the tokens around the map, and otherwise play the game the same way they would play it as if they were sitting around a table together - looking at their books, writing on actual printed character sheets, rolling real dice, etc. And of course there are all levels in-between.

iTabletop started out with the more simple approach, containing no rule-sets and keeping the play more like standard in-person play, and added live audio and video streaming to the VTT to emphasize the "people" aspect and let the group see and talk to each other while they play. However our new version of iTabletop under development called "SilverTable" adds more tools to automate play, while attempting to still stay rules-agnostic so you can play any paper and pen RPG with it.

Morkalg: Can you explain a little of the technology involved behind the scenes?

James: Sure. Most VTTs take the approach of making the Game Master's computer be a server, which sends the game materials like map images, token images, character sheets, etc., to the players PCs directly. Also, most VTTs only contain text chat for communication, and limited or no support for sound, like music and sound effects. How these VTTs accomplish their functionality I'm not sure - some are written in languages like C++ or Visual Basic, and have a plain Windows style interface, and others are written with more visual platforms like Adobe Director, for example, and attempt to have a nicer look and feel.

While I can't explain how these other VTTs work under the hood - of course I can explain how iTabletop works. First I'll talk about the current version of iTabletop which is a Windows desktop application. It is written in C#.NET, probably the most widely used language today for powerful desktop applications. Certainly the business community uses C# extensively and it is a wonderful language and platform to work within.

iTabletop has a slick look and feel, based on a proprietary user interface I wrote about six years ago. The iTabletop "system" consists of 1.) a client desktop application running on the user's PC, 2.) web services running on Windows servers that exist in the Amazon.com EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute), 3.) a massive Microsoft SQL Server database also in the EC2, and 4.) game materials like images, sounds, documents and videos stored in the Amazon.com S3 (Simple Storage Service).

Now choosing Amazon.com EC2 and S3 were probably the best choices we ever made. Because the servers and material storage exist in this huge, powerful "cloud" from Amazon, we gain the speed and reliability that the Amazon.com website has always enjoyed. Since our going live commercially in December (about 8 months ago), we have never seen the system crash or be unavailable. Our server was hacked twice by someone we used to work with, but because of the way the servers are "virtual" in the cloud, we just spun up new, identical virtual servers and in about 10 minutes we were back up and running. That kind of ability to have virtual servers is a thing of beauty. And with Amazon EC2 we can automatically spin up more servers whenever the load gets heavy, so basically we can't be overrun by too many users. We can ramp from 20 users to 200,000 to 2 million in about 10 minutes, with no problems at all. Again - this was one of the best choices we ever made.

Now our new version SilverTable - that is something we're so excited about. It is a 100% complete rewrite of the system, using the new Microsoft Silverlight 3.0 platform. This platform is fantastic because it creates a Rich User Interface like Adobe Flash, however it is written using the powerful and business-centric C#.Net language, so large client-server applications are easy to write using this system. In other words, we gain the slick, animated "sparkly" interface like Flash, while retaining the powerful, reliable, business-like application development that is the hallmark of traditional Microsoft languages. Also, Silverlight runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, so we're crossing the platform barriers which is a rare thing for VTTs.

Morkalg: Is this system only for roleplaying games?

James: Well traditionally VTTs have been just for roleplaying games. We want to change that though, because we see this opportunity to allow people to play all kinds of tabletop games using iTabletop, specifically the new SilverTable version.

As an example, with the addition of a system that handles decks of cards, SilverTable will be able to host practically any board game or card game. Think of playing Zombies with your friends. You'll have a deck of board tiles that players position in the table area to create the game board. You'll have decks of cards that the game uses, and each player will have their own hand. What are the normal plastic zombie pieces you move around the board, will instead be animated lifelike tokens that make zombie groans and moans, and amble along as you move them. We're quite excited about adding these features like card deck handling to the VTT so it can be expanded to play again, any board or card game.

This really represents a major goal of iTabletop, to make the VTT be a treat to look at visually, and be easy and intuitive to use so players don't have to be programmers to use it, so that more people can have fun playing games online with people that have moved away for example, family, friends, etc. We want to mainstream online tabletop game playing - and SilverTable is the technology that's going to do that.

Morkalg: What sets iTabletop apart from other VTTs?

James: The most obvious thing of course is adding the streaming audio and video into the VTT so players can see and talk with each other while playing. We think this adds back in the people factor and is essential to the future of online tabletop gaming.

Another thing is a focus on creating a rich user interface that is nice to look at and pleasing and intuitive to use, while still providing powerful automation systems under the hood. Many VTTs out there today are so difficult to setup, you practically need to be a programmer or at least know a scripting language to use them.

Keeping the VTT rules agnostic is another important differentiation - so people can play any game at all. This comes from our wide-reaching goal of bringing people together on the Internet - a goal that transcends the concept of just allowing people to play tabletop RPGs online.

Another important distinction is our client-server architecture using the fast and reliable Amazon.com EC2 and S3 services I've mentioned above, which makes the streaming of video, audio and game materials as fast as possible, and also eliminates firewall and NAT traversal problems associated with other VTTs where the Game Master's PC is the server and has to communicate directly with the player's computers.

Morkalg: What do you see this bringing to the gaming community?

James: When SilverTable is released within a couple months, I see a few high-level, paradigm-changing things being added to the pen and paper RPG gaming community.

First, SilverTable is being written with Social Networking systems in place. For example, when you create character, creature or object tokens, you can choose to share them with the entire iTabletop community. This means when someone else needs a cool skeleton for the game she's running in D20, she'll be able to find one that was created by someone else, and make a copy of it, tweak it to her needs, and use it in her game. This kind of open sharing of game materials is going to make a huge difference in making gaming more accessible to new GMs and players, and make setting up an running games much quicker. 

As another fun part of the social networking systems we're adding in a community rating system for games and game materials. This way players can be proud when their artwork, tokens, etc. rise to the top of popularity in the community, and other players will be able to easily find those popular items for their games.

I think another thing we've already brought to the table (no pun intended) and are even doing more of in SilverTable, is adding a rich, immersive nature to online tabletop gaming. With a focus on high-quality music and sound effect streaming, and even video cut scenes GMs can play for their players, the tabletop RPG played online can actually be a more rich, involving experience than when playing in-person at a table. In fact that is another one of our wide-reaching goals, to make VTTs offer a better play experience than traditional in-person games can offer. And as people continue to spread out geographically more and more, it's a kind of altruistic thing to offer this better play experience so they can spend enjoyable time together.

Morkalg: What do you think the future of VTTs will be? Any grand schemes for iTabletop?

James: I suppose I've covered much of this already. To summarize, I think the future of VTTs is to make them nicer to use and more easily accessible to non-hardcore gamers. To mainstream roleplaying so that the masses don't think of roleplaying as "that evil Dungeons and Dragons game," but rather see it as a common, fun thing to do with friends. To make hardcore GMs happy with the automation tools in the VTT, while removing the need for them to be pseudo-programmers in order to setup and operate the game. To immerse players in a world of rich music, sound effects, and animation similar to 3D video games and MMOs, while retaining all the complexity and richness of play that traditional pen and paper tabletop RPGs offer. 

Morkalg: How did you find yourself developing a project like this?

James: Some people already know this, but the current iTabletop desktop version started out as a face-to-face business online meeting software. Looking at the application you can tell this. It took 4 developers 2 years to create, and the original company who hired me to form and lead the team  to develop the software, is right now selling it as an enterprise-level corporate communication system. I'm proud of how good an enterprise system it is - and even own stock in that company and hope for great things from it. 
However a couple of developers on my team were hardcore tabletop RPG gamers, actually GMs. We immediately saw the opportunity to modify the system to make a more immersive, face-to-face, personal and fun VTT. So we did that, and now it turns out a number of the things that the enterprise businesses are using in the software actually came from the VTT nature of the software. Turning the software into a VTT actually made the business version better and more complete.

Our team has since broken away from the original corporation that hired us to make the software, and we've reached a settlement that allows us to continue with iTabletop full force. And of course SilverTable is a completely new software that we are building first as a VTT, and second with face-to-face video streaming included. In other words, SilverTable from its inception is for gaming - and is so perfectly fitted to this use, and contains so many new features and concepts that other VTTs don't have, that we expect it to rise to the head of the VTT pack quickly. 

Morkalg: Can you tell us more about Auldsoft? How big of a company are you? Any sort of "corporate culture" or company outlook?

James: One of the things that makes Auldsoft good at creating software is our small size. We are small enough to quickly turn on a dime, a good example of this being how in a couple weeks we retrofitted an entire Amazon.com integration and turned iTabletop into a much more powerful and stable system. Large companies just can't make quick decisions and rapid turnaround like a tight, efficient company and development team can.

As far as corporate culture goes - I suppose I set that myself. I believe programmers should be comfortable, thus I don't care what people wear to the office (as long as they are wearing clothes.) I think programmers should be open to sharing their knowledge with each other and not be in competition - so we do that on a daily basis. I believe customers come first, and so we strive to treat everyone in the iTabletop community with respect and caring - and I think that's evident when you read the forums and see how issues are resolved and relationships are being built. At the same time our culture is to run this thing as a business as well, not just as gamers having fun, because that is where the polish and professionalism comes from and it really needs to be that way for the company and product to survive and offer the gaming community great things now and in the future. 

Morkalg: Are there other projects other than the VTT on the drawing board?

James: Well, SilverTable is being written first and foremost as a VTT. However, it is architected and built with a dual purpose in mind - a project code-named "Foreverlands".

After SilverTable is built up in its user base, and all the far-reaching features are added and the entire thing is humming along stable, we will start work on Foreverlands and while I'm not going into detail about Foreverlands because it represents a new paradigm in online communities and gaming - I can say it's going to be a blast to use and extremely unique.