Ricky Road: The open-source gaming community

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.

We have successfully transplanted the platform into something much more contemporary. The flash platform will ensure that the game is playable for many years to come (as in it isn't a fly-by-night product. It has been maturing for many years). It will also ensure that the game is playable on many many different OS's. Virtually any machine with a plug-in compliant browser is able to play Gorillas.bas. Which makes it available for a much wider audience than the original. So now that we have recreated all the olde glory of the original, we can begin to take advantages of its contemporary platform. Namely XML sockets.

So....Gorilla War, here are the features we are planning to implement

1. Match the game rules of the original gorillas

This first one is a simple requirment. Keep the rules the same. You get hit with a banana you die. Moving on.

2. Match the graphical and audio output of the original QBasic Gorillas

We want to make sure the game does not take away from the original. There have been a few remakes of Gorillas over the years, but none of them have matched the original so closely. We like that and from the feedback we have gotten on other blogs, the players like that too. So it stays. 8 bit color and system speaker audio. Everything added in will use the DOS font and will be anti-alias free.

3. Persistent online user profiles

Your user profile on rickyroad.com will be integrated with your Gorilla War avatar. Whatever username you use with rickyroad.com will be shown on the Gorilla war screen. If you are a female play your little gorilla will have a cute pink bow on its head.


4. Persistent gameplay statistics tied to the online profile

Ever stat you want to track you can track. Hit percentage. Suicides. Win/Loss ratio. Fastest kill. Longest game. Longest game ever. Fastest game ever. Most killed. Most killed by. Friends. Ignores. etc. etc. All your stats will be displayed on the end game summary for that match. And likewise before you play against a player(s) you can see how good they are.
Just gonna warn y'all right now; I will pwn the pants off everyone playing. All those "quality assurance" hours pay off.

neway...

5. Network multiplayer 1 vs 1 games

This is a given. This was the first thing we wanted to accomplish after Gorillas.bas was done.

6. Network multiplayer 4-way and 8-way player games

This is where it gets interesting. The image above is an example of what we want to do in this regard. The one issue that we might have with this is a long wait between throws. Instead of waiting for one person to make up their mind you have to wait for 7 people. But that brings us to the next point...

7. Option for timer based throws

Why wait? How about every 30 seconds you are prompted for a new shot? I'm pretty excited about this one. Once this is in we will be seeing more than one banana in the sky at time. Death from above. This will play out the same way as the original Gorillas, the last one standing is the winner. Unless you are playing team vs team, then the last standing players team will win.

8. Timed games - Max points you can score in [x number of minutes/seconds]

You die, you respawn, they die, they respawn. Lets say its set to 1 minute 30 seconds and every 10 seconds you throw. Suicides will count against you. You may respawn in the middle, the other side or a new city may be drawn. Either way throw as many bananas as you can in the time allotted. Its pop-a-shot, but with exploding bananas.

9. Team based gameplay

I mentioned this above. You play as a team. Everyone on the left vs everyone on the right. Its the sharks vs the jets.

10. MOTD Screen

Message of the day screen. This is one of the bleh ones but bleh whatever. There it is.

11. In-Game chat

There are hotkeys added in that will open a prompt at the bottom of the screen. Hit the "S" key to say and so forth. The chats will appear briefly above the players head and will be added to a chat screen that can be toggled with the "v" key.

12. Ability to record your games.

Now this is where we get XBOX livey with it. We have a formula to do this by using very little data in our database. You will be able to keep a game as long as you want to view later. All the shots and buildings will be showing as they were in the original game. So if you pwnt someone and want to rub it in their face later, you can.

13. Ability to playback yourgames and other playersgames.

This is hand and hand with the previous requirement. Basically a view for not only your own games but anyone else.

14. Lame duck indicator

What happens when you get 9 matches into an 11 match game and you have 8 points? The other player can't win no matter what. So we will have an indicator to show you when you or someone else is a lame duck. So you don't have to go through the gruesome task of simply subtracting.

15. Lame duck dropout

This of course goes hand in hand with the previous requirement. You can specify before the game begins to stop the game if someone is past the point of no return. Just a matter of convenience.

A couple other things. We are not going to allow you to see the other players shots. If you or someone drops out before they are lame-ducked that player looses. We are filtering cursing and vulgar language if you choose not to see it.

So, sounds like a lot doesn't it? The good news is we have settled on Electro-Server as our backend system -AND- we have already written and tested a working version of the 1 vs 1 multi-player game. Not just tested on our internal network, but tested from 2 separate physical addresses using the gorilla war server cluster. All is well. You will be happy to know that I won that game. Quite handily if I do say so myself.

Moving on...

Currently we are developing tracer 2 of the game which will incorporate rickyroad.com profiles into the game. This is the phase where we marry all the technologies into one cohesive gaming machine. These features were a catalyst for some of the major overhauls in our web application. We are just finishing up those changes to the rickyroad web app and will be moving on to the other major artifacts for tracer 2.

Please check back or drop us a line...