My villain origin story when it comes to software lies in Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto games... now that deserves a whole post of its own but this one is about a worldwide collaborative effort to revive an abandoned community.
Little do most know, but there's a hugely popular game modification called "San Andreas Multiplayer" it's super big in Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, and many more countries. The problem is, that the developer of this modification went dark a few years ago and the updates stopped coming.
Long story short, an amazing grassroots effort from core fans of the game and members of the community resulted in reverse engineering the modification (and game itself) to produce an RPC-compatible implementation!
Now I didn't really get into the C++ side of things as much smarter folks than I handled that. However, I'm proud to have led the community management, branding design and web infrastructure for the project.
One challenge was, being an international community, we needed a site that supported full internationalisation so we could get the word out as fast as possible when the original project's forums went offline.
The website itself (at the time of writing) has 132 amazing contributors who have written translations, code and design!
My branding work for the project is over here and the site itself is live here.
I don't get much time to play games nowadays but the worldwide communities of multiplayer games will always have a special place in my heart for being amazing spaces for teaching, enabling and making life-long friends ❤️
Little do most know, but there's a hugely popular game modification called "San Andreas Multiplayer" it's super big in Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, and many more countries. The problem is, that the developer of this modification went dark a few years ago and the updates stopped coming.
Long story short, an amazing grassroots effort from core fans of the game and members of the community resulted in reverse engineering the modification (and game itself) to produce an RPC-compatible implementation!
Now I didn't really get into the C++ side of things as much smarter folks than I handled that. However, I'm proud to have led the community management, branding design and web infrastructure for the project.
One challenge was, being an international community, we needed a site that supported full internationalisation so we could get the word out as fast as possible when the original project's forums went offline.
The website itself (at the time of writing) has 132 amazing contributors who have written translations, code and design!
My branding work for the project is over here and the site itself is live here.
I don't get much time to play games nowadays but the worldwide communities of multiplayer games will always have a special place in my heart for being amazing spaces for teaching, enabling and making life-long friends ❤️