My work on Momentum Mod
Momentum Mod is a free, open-source speedrunning game based on community game-modes for Counter-Strike such as Surf, Bunnyhop, and more. I used to spend hours of my day surfing on community servers and I wanted to give back to the community.
I worked on Momentum Mod for ~2 years in the "early days" from around 2016 to 2018 (a few months after work initially began on the project). Back then, we had very few people working on the game, I was one of only 5 developers, and it was very much a seat-of-the-pants affair. We knew very little and cared even less about what we didn't know.
Momentum was actually the reason I got into programming to begin with. I knew I wanted to contribute, so I took an online C++ intro class and started messing around in my free time.
As I grew more confident, I worked on more important aspects of the game.
I implemented the "replay" feature that allows people to watch their run after they finish, and share this recording with others.
This works similar to a demo file a la doom/quake, except smaller in size, since it only recorded a few data points for each "tick" (essentially a server frame).
Over this time period I worked on many parts of the project: an early version of our website, various development
tools, a prototype of online play using POSIX sockets and raw UDP data, and much more.
I even wrote a number of blog posts on the momentum-mod development blog.
As the project matured and more people became interested, the team grew to be far more organized and effective. It was around this time that my interest in surfing and bunnyhopping began to fade, and I began to struggle more with utilizing our outdated game engine instead of seeing it as a fun resource-constrained challenge as I had in the beginning. So I passed the torch to the growing group of new developers and moved on to other projects.