I’ll be honest. I initially started developing SocketShot in order to escape my old job in tech support and land a gig as a legit software engineer. In Nov 2017, I used SocketShot as a portfolio piece when interviewing for positions, and upon displaying the game to my first choice employer, they immediately gave me a job – showcasing a shitty nodejs game you develop turns out to be more persuasive than you would think. Since getting the job, almost all my energy has been focused on gaining my bearings as a software dev (a new world for me), and SocketShot, having served its initial purpose, fell to the wayside. Last week, I decided to check out the game I had spent so many weeks on, and I was surprised at how fun and actually good it felt to play! It deserves further development in my estimation, and I want to see how far I can take the concept now that I’ve achieved an acceptable level of competence at my job and have more available time.

With the success of Fortnite and other free-to-play games, the internet is rife with potential for free, easily accessible, competitive multiplayer games. A browser-based game could reach even more people, and games such as TagPro (back in its hay-day) have shown that a competitive audience can be achieved with the right formula. In my estimation, the reason TagPro couldn’t fully breakthrough was that it did not have a compelling concept – to neither casual nor hardcore gamers. Casual people aren’t stimulated by colored balls bouncing around trying to capture a flag, and the hardcore… aren’t stimulated by colored balls bouncing around trying to capture a flag. I love TagPro, but no one can relate to a colored ball. SocketShot I think has the potential to learn from the success of TagPro, while offering a concept more compelling than colored balls – ethnically diverse groups shooting the shit out of each other.