Ricky Road: The open-source gaming community

I recently added a developer to the Gorilla War project. It just happened to be right after I moved the project out of my internal network and onto the web where anyone can access it. That in itself is not really strange in the open source world. After all the pieces that comprise rickyroad.com have been written by people in the UK, Canada and various parts of the US. Despite how tiny my little dot-com here looks it actually ISN'T just me. But its mainly me.

About a month and half ago I got a bill from the hosting company that rickyroad.com used to sit on. They notified me they had closed my service due to delinquency. This came as a surprise to me seeing as how I thought our relationship was done. And so I set about sending them an email. But lo-and-behold I couldn't send an email, because they were hosting it. Emphasis on WERE. Like a complete idiot I had forgotten that I never moved my email services to the new host. Here I am sitting in what felt like an island detached from the world with no way to communicate. You know, other than gmail, or a phone, or creating a blog entry, or just flat out telling someone, I was on an island detached from the world with no way to communicate. My millions and millions of fan mails were ruthlessly being bounced back to their originators. And when I say "fan mails" I mean Herbal male enhancement offers.

You know what we spend 80% of our time doing on the gorillas / gorilla war game? Making it look like shit. Seriously. When you crack open gorillas and type in your name, take a second to look at the font. If you open up Microsoft Word and type your name, look for a font in the list that looks like that. Chances are you wont find it. Look for it online. Chances are you wont find it there either. I couldn't find it. Who would make something that ugly? Imagine if you received a sales report or turned in a report at school written entirely in that font.

But lo and behold, we made something that ugly. When I say we, I mean me, because I think I'm the only developer who wants to mess with that shit. Why did I do it? I love gorillas and when I started down this road I wanted to make gorillas exactly like the original. Almost more like a tribute than a game. And judging by some of the emails I get almost every fan of the game out there loves the game exactly the way it was. So that's exactly why its there. Its not pretty like a AMC Gremlin isn't pretty but when you find someone who loves it, they wouldn't change a thing about it.

The Gorilla War Alpha is getting close

First off thanks to everyone for being patient with us. I have a bunch of updates I am going to go through about Gorilla War in the next few days. If your not familiar with what Gorilla War is please check out our announcement.

Listen up: IT IS COMING. I promise. Ricky Road is gonna give everyone a little Christmas gift: We will be releasing a fully playable alpha version of Gorilla War. In August. 2010.

I know the internet has a propensity to bring out the best in people through the veil of anonymity. But having said that, there is no need to send me a thank you email regarding this spectacular announcement. Just in case you absolutely have to our contact page is here. Btw It's Chris spelled with a "Ch".

I get the drift that SOME PEOPLE think the game is never gonna come. It will come and it will also rock you to your boxers.

Notice the nudity? We don't shy away from controversy.

I've worked on many many software projects over the years. Some that are just me (Rickyroad.com is an example of that) and some that require hundreds of developers to build and maintain. I've never worked on a project that I didn't have passion for. I never worked on a project that I didn't take personally. In fact a lot of the people I have worked with in the past would probably say that is my predominate flaw and my predominate strength in the industry. It is tough to watch a project go in a direction you don't like when you put a piece of yourself into it.

Open source projects have a major problem that is becoming alarming. No one seems to agree on anything.

When I was 19 I had been a professional illustrator for over two years. I had started out doing caricatures at the local amusement park and moved on to doing private work. During this time I was approached by two young ladies who had a business proposition for me. They had a small "art" company that was focusing on photography, pottery and illustration. The name of the company was "Wonderfully Made" (I, obviously, didn't have much say in the name). One of the girls was the CEO and the other was the creative influence. And adding me, I was the so-called "talent". So we talked about what they had in mind and how they could use me and their basic business model. They wanted me to design and paint murals for residential and business clients. I was very interested and agreed to work with them. It was a great idea, with one small issue, I was the only one who knew how to draw or how to paint. In fact if you want to drill down closer to the heart of the problem it would be: I was the only one who knew how to draw and paint and I knew it. And so did they.

As many people know Firefox 3 has been released recently. Whether or not you choose to use it is your business. But I can tell you it is fast. Very fast. They set out to make it fast and I can say for certain "Mission Accomplished".

Let me also preface this by saying I adore Firefox and use it as my primary browser.

Wanna relive the glory days?

Good. That's why we remade it.

Pixel for pixel we carefully recreated an ancient DOS video game legend. Hurry and play it before its graphics go out of date. We might start charging 25 cents to play like the arcade. Simply slide a quarter into your floppy disk drive.

We realize there are quite a few recreations of this video game relic. However, how many are 100% pixel perfect recreations? We remember the glory days in high school playing Gorillas during class. We just wanted to play it again. Just the way that it was. Don't add paint to a masterpiece, bro.

You want graphics? We use a total of 8 different blistering bits to produce a mind-blowing 256 colors.

You want audio? Gorilla boasts full 1.1 surround sound. To fully appreciate the surround sound capabilities of Gorilla, occasionally turn your chair around so the computer speaker is behind you. The sound literally penetrates the air with the piercing clarity of a screaming bald eagle.

Not sold yet? How about 100% keyboard and monitor support?

You're friggin welcome.

So we are planning to make this game. It's called gorilla war. It's been a glimmer in my eye for over 8 years now.

It's finally coming along. And I am going to go ahead and start talking about what we are planning to do with it.

Obviously it's a continuation on the Gorillas.bas game. You probably have figured out that it will be a multi-player version of some sort. So basically two people don't have to sit at the same computer and use the same keyboard to play against each other (that was always a great way to get some face time with cute girls back in the day. Let them win too). Truth is multi-player was the intent all along when I started writing flash gorillas in the summer of 07. In fact if you really want to go back, I wanted to create a multi-player version of Gorillas back in 99 and tried to force myself to learn Java applets. I eventually gave up on learning that unfortunately and in-turn gave up on Gorillas multi-player. But, like I said before, I have refreshed my intention to do so.

So here we are: we have a clean 100% pixel perfect flash version of Gorillas.bas. This is a great jumping off point for the multi-player version I had intended.

A Legal Game of Chicken

The flash gorillas game has been online for 2 months and 20,000 people have played the game so far. Bitchin. And theres been no cease and desist in the mailbox yet. There was understandably some trepidation at first to bring the game online due to that very reason. After all, Gorillas has been released before. And our version is 100% identical to that first initial release. And in that first release there was a copyright line on the splash screen. See the below screenshot.

But - And thats a big BUT - there is no record that WE can find for International Business Machines and Gorillas in 1991. In fact there is no record of a copyright for International Business Machines and Gorillas ever. Even IBM and QBasic only turns up a few manuals. Feel free to search the copyright records for yourself.