Ricky Road: The open-source gaming community

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. And it is absolutely blissful to push an application into new territory and see it succeed. To me it is those brief moments of euphoria and agony that keep my love affair with code alive. I am confident that after 10 years of developing software that I will never pursue another craft as long as I have the choice to build software. I simply love it. And I am rare indeed because of that.

It is that love that brings many developers to set out on a journey to write massive applications like Linux, Firefox and even Windows. Windows XP was 40 million lines of code. 40 Million! And if you distill all that work down to just the passion and ideas, you see the minds and hearts of many many developers. Some are driven to create or explore and some are driven to pay their bills. Either way it takes many hands, many minds, many ideas, agreements and arguments to build something on that scale. Even though I love Linux and I love the idea of open-source I still respect quality no matter what license agreement it is released under.

In the past the open-source community has seen its fair share of burnout. People start out gung-ho and fizzle out later on. And with them the project fizzles out as well. Maybe it has happened to you. It happens to a lot of guys. It has most definitely happened to me. I love Ricky Road. I really want to finish what I started here. But some of the things that were thought up between the initial idea and what we have now are not things I want to finish. Yes I want a game network. And yes I want to build Gorilla War, Nibbles and Nibbles Ladder. Do I want to compete with adultswim.com and nonoba.com? Not really. Do I want to make 20 million dollars from this site. Well yea. But that isn't my drive right now.

I loved Gorillas when I was in high school. I really loved it. That was my first experience writing code, building code (well not ACTUALLY building considering QBasic is an interpreted language) and debugging code. I remember when I discovered what i = i + 1 meant. That is a bona fide baby step and it really stands out for me because I was so happy to understand what it meant (I actually spent about 6 hours that night writing little algorithms using i = i + 1 just to watch the numbers count higher and higher). I actually understood what a loop was. That is such a tiny tiny little victory, but I got so much joy from that. And that is why I wanted to write Gorillas. Lets face it, Gorillas ain't gonna be on XBOX Live Arcade. But if some kid out there takes the source code and sees i++ in the action script and pours over it until he finally realizes what it is actually doing, and then if that kid is total nerd like me and has moment of elation like I did, then rickyroad.com is worth it. When you find something great, and you can share that with someone else and they love it, then it is worth it. Screw the money. I mean, don't get me wrong, I will take the money, and I will spend it on many many retarded things. But I would rather just have something cool for someone to discover.

Now having said that I have gotten a lot of cool emails from people talking about the game and many many replies about Basic and Nibbles and etc etc. So I know people are enjoying the game. So I want to get back to that. What people enjoy to play. Not the mega network and the chivalrous crusade of open-source awareness. Lets just make some cool games. So here we go:

Gorillas - Done.
Gorilla War - Working on it
Nibbles - Not even started. Please email me if you want to work on this project.
Nibbles Ladder - Same. I'm not even started. But I can tell you the notes I have scribbled about this game are friggin sweet.

Thats it. Ricky Road Inc right now is an arm chair, a laptop, a little passion and a couple ideas.

Thanks for playing.