Filed under: Tech
It was almost 9 years ago to the day today that I first released my game WinBolo to the public. (Released 19th Dec 1999) – I first started work on it 10 years ago. WinBolo is an implementation of one of my favourite childhood games – Bolo. I think Bolo was the first network computer games I ever played. Anyway, if you are reading this blog you probably already know all this because you know me…
Today I released with source code to WinBolo as well as all the related applications and utilities under the GPL open source license. It was a weird feeling. The game was such a large part of my life for so long. In some ways I feel like a parent whose child is going out into the world, in others I’m thinking about how bad I was a programming 10 years ago. (WinBolo was my second real sized application in C)Â – but still its better to make the source code available and let the game continue rather to eventually die out from inaction from me. It still amazes me that thousands of people have played the game over the years, over 2,700 registered players on the community forums (more stats from WBN for the past 5 years) and still on average 80 games are played a day even though I haven’t done anything in the past 2 and a half years.
I started a wiki to documented the design and to make it easier for people to begin developing as well. It’ll be interesting to see what will happen next…