Hello! As you may have noticed, It’s been a long time since we’ve had an update on the front page. We’ve been keeping people up to date off-site, but we’re long overdue for another status update. So what’s happening?

New Hub Website:

You may have noticed some odd behaviour with the website over the last few days, that’s due to us switching hosts and getting our new website ready to go live.

Our plan for the site is ambitious. Ultimately we’d like to use the Space Station 13 domain responsibly and begin offering news and information for both versions of the game, including the many BYOND branches currently in development.

This means when the site rolls out in the next few days, we’ll have a dedicated BYOND section that will provide links and information to the many community hubs, servers, forums and wikis. Our roots are mainly in the original ‘goonstation‘ branch developed by the Something Awful community, but we’d like to extend an olive branch to anyone that would like to take part.

We’ve also approached several people in the community that are integral to the game’s past (and future) development, and they’ll be contributing a few stories on our behalf.

Development:

The silence may have said a lot, but development has been a struggle as of late. Our focus on rewriting large sections of the game has not only slowed our progress and momentum over the last few months, but a lot of the team’s motivation.

As you know from our last back-end update, there were a lot of systems in place that needed optimising due to the number of messages being sent to and from the client/server. This will probably be put on the backburner while we regroup and think about our next steps. The current plan is to try to get more content into the game.

We’ve also unfortunately lost founding team-member and coder, Enstorm. With the birth of his newborn daughter earlier this year, he ultimately decided that he could no longer dedicate the free time to working on the project while balancing his work and personal life. We want to thank Enstorm for his time, and acknowledge that we have a large amount of respect for both him and his work.

Our artist Supernorn has recently been hired at Chucklefish to begin work on a new title currently entering early development. We wish to offer a huge congratulations to him!

Supernorn resprited the majority of BYOND SS13‘s art assets in early 2009, and is responsible for the majority of the art in SS13 Standalone. Despite his recent hire, he’ll continue working with us to develop the game.

The Future:

Do the recent setbacks and barriers mean we’ve given up and cancelled the project? No.

With game development, you hit hurdles and brick walls every day. This is simply the nature of the beast. Anyone who has attempted to develop and design a game will be the first to tell you that it’s a hard path to follow. Space Station 13 is an incredibly ambitious game, with a large amount of systems and simulations interacting and co-existing with each other. This makes the hurdles and barriers bigger and more frequent, especially for a small team with no budget, working for free in their spare time.

There’s a reason all past attempts have stumbled at the first few hurdles, but we’ve got the furthest to the finish line so far. We’re going to keep running.