December 1984
It was a late evening in December 1984. My brother-in-law was already on his way out the door when he turned around. "Oh, I almost forgot. I've got a tape for you. Some new games."
New to the world? Probably not. New to me? Absolutely. I was living in Poland, where everything arrived, let's say, gently behind schedule. I had my first computer, an Atari 800 XL, and getting any software for it was so hard that I had started to teach myself to code just to have something to run. What could I write, though, alone, with no tutorials and no one to ask?
So I pushed the tape into the cassette player, my only storage device, and waited. About ten minutes. It wasn't that bad.
What came up would look ridiculous today: a few cacti, two super-pixelated guys, and me as one of them. We were supposed to shoot each other, and when a cactus stood in the way, you bounced your shot off the floor or the ceiling to get around it. I loved that idea instantly. For a long time afterwards I dreamed of making something like it. I tried, in Atari BASIC, more than once. It never became anything you could honestly call playable. The machine simply had other ideas.
Thirty years later: Flash
In 2015 the tools had caught up. Flash and ActionScript were exactly what I had been missing: I could build something real, and it would play right there in the browser. Tutorials existed by then, if you knew where to dig, and though it took quite a few months of hard work, on top of the office job I had back then, in September 2015 the first version was live. I called it Rubber Bullets and published it on Kongregate, where it still exists. Here is the link, but I suggest you do NOT click there :)
I had learned ActionScript. What I had not learned was everything else, which in broad terms you might call PR. And there was one more problem: the game was hard. Brutally hard, from the very first level. It didn't feel that way to me at the time, but I was the one who had built it. I published it, didn't see much interest, got on with the rest of my life, and forgot about it for over ten years.
Ten years later, again
Then, more or less by accident, I landed on that old page. There weren't many comments, but every single one was positive. So I sat down to play my own game, and I couldn't get through the first level.
That's when I understood what had gone wrong. So here is a promise: the first floor of Ricoshot won't be hard. Maybe only the first.
I had a new dream, too: this game on every platform. And I did the maths. Coding it the way I always had, alone, character by character, through every platform's rules and requirements, would take me about twenty years. Realistically, I'd never finish, because before I got the first platform done the next one would have changed its rules again. Today I don't have to work alone. With an AI at my side (Claude, if you're asking) it took a couple of months, and the game came out with ten times the features and fun of the original. Rubber Bullets always sounded a bit odd anyway, so the game got a new name: Ricoshot.
Why it plays the way it does
Every app I have ever made, this one included, was originally built for one user: me. I saw a game I loved and wanted a version tailored to the way I play. Other apps I built to help me learn, to organise my life, to make it a little better.
Then, when I turned fifty, I found out something that stunned me. I'm neurodivergent: ADHD, together with a mild autism. Mild enough that I could live half a century without knowing. I do have a background in psychology, so once I started reading, the dots connected fast. It turned out that everything I had built for myself was, in fact, built for people who are neurodivergent.
Ricoshot is no exception. In the original you could only ever have one bullet in the air at a time, and I kept that as a mode. It's called Zen. The game is much slower that way, and it helps you relax and focus. I'd honestly call it a form of meditation.
Thank you for playing
I hope you enjoy the game. Feel free to send me your comments and ideas for features; I do hope to get to a version two someday. For now, I'm looking forward to getting back to my other projects, like Memorly, which you can read about on adaminion.com.
Adam