Jun 12, 2018
A Look Back at My History
A retrospective on older web and app projects, the communities around them, and what I learned building them.
In 2005 I moved from the UK to Spain. I was 11 years old and brought an old Dell computer and CRT monitor that had mostly been used for school work and MSN Messenger.
It wasn’t long before a friend introduced me to computer games, specifically Delta Force: Black Hawk Down. The best part, there was a free demo available with both single and multiplayer.
My old Dell couldn’t really play the game. It would run, but it could not draw all the graphics. I could see characters but not objects, which meant I could unfairly see opponents through buildings, but I still couldn’t reach them because I’d run straight into walls.
I convinced my parents to upgrade my computer and finally could play for real. This changed my life.
It wasn’t long before I moved from Delta Force: Black Hawk Down to Delta Force: Xtreme. Again, there was a demo with multiplayer available. I sank hours and hours into playing and made friends online across the globe.
It wasn’t long before my curiosity went further than just playing. I had to understand how these games worked, and I discovered the modding community. It was a perfect initiation into programming: so much could be done by modifying existing code and seeing what happened.
I started a service building ‘custom skins’ for clans. I’d edit model texture files and apply clan logos so when teams recorded competitions, vehicles and weapons would all show their branding. As long as I didn’t touch the character skins, anti-cheat didn’t care.
Fast forward a year or so and I started building proper mods, pulling in vehicles, weapons, and maps from other NovaLogic games. Eventually the DFX demo was shut down. By then I could actually buy the full game, but the tight-knit demo community wasn’t the same and I never really got involved.
I started playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare shortly before Delta Force was shut down and was blown away by the graphics and its ‘realism’.
In 2009 I founded FpsOverload, an online community for FPS games. This was my first real dive into web development. I think FpsOverload started as a phpBB forum and eventually migrated to vBulletin.
We hosted multiple Call of Duty servers, both modded and unmodded, and grew a large community of gamers. I built a suite of tools that interfaced between the forum and game servers to handle ban appeals and moderation.
In 2012 I made the mistake of selling FpsOverload. I was given guarantees that the new owner would keep growing the forum and maintain it the way I had, but they quickly turned it into a simple SEO backlink farm.
Whilst building moderation tools for FpsOverload I got my first iPhone and was pulled into iOS development on my dual-boot Hackintosh/gaming PC. I built an RCon app (iRcon) which I believe was the first iOS RCon tool.
I had to convince my parents to drive away from our house and use 3G to upload the binaries to Apple as our home internet connection wasn’t good enough.
After iRcon I built a series of apps. iCercanias was the first iOS app to offer train timetables for Spain’s Cercanias lines. TuBici was the only app showing Valenbici bike-sharing availability.
From the success of iRcon I was invited to join the official Battlefield 3rd Party Developer program for Battlefield 3. I expanded the application to support Battlefield games.
Around the same time I joined the Battlefieldo team, starting with a redesign of the forum, followed by a migration to a more news focused website.