Thoughts

Space Station 13 is a cult-classic, open source, multiplayer co-op role-playing experience of doing your job in a faraway space station trying to keep everything from collapsing around you, while surrounded by worldly and otherworldly dangers alike.  However, the game has many flaws, and these flaws only become more obvious as time passes. SS13 is coded on the BYOND engine, a twentieth-century relic of weak computers and weaker internet connections, and from the viewpoint of a modern developer, it’d be hard to justify ever using it at all.  So, of course, the community of SS13 has been looking for a way to escape this engine, and port the game over to a more functional software. There have been multiple attempts at this, but the one I have experience with is Space Station 14, developed on the custom Robust Toolbox engine.  It, like its predecessor, is fully open source, and the game’s launcher and server browser is powerful enough to allow anyone to simply click “connect” for any running server, regardless of what version or code branch that server is running.  It frees the players from SS13’s grid-based movement system and allows much more precise movement, has functioning space shuttles that can even be custom-built during a round, and many other features that would be simply impossible to accomplish on the BYOND engine.

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However, Space Station 14 is not finished - in fact, it is missing quite a lot of content from the original game, with most of the departments only having a barebones skeleton of their jobs.  And, due to its open source nature, there is no dedicated team of developers, only a team of maintainers who decide what code gets merged into the “main branch”.  This makes development of the missing parts rather slow, since it needs someone in the community to decide to make it and expect nothing in return.  While progress is being made, it is slow, and there are often disputes between members of the community and the maintainers over decisions.  It is a pit of chaos, and a common joke in the community is that any desired major feature update is always “just a week away”- shorthand for “very, very far away, and possibly never”.  

A large portion of game design is a lie, nothing but a big trick of smoke and mirrors to make the player think there’s something where there’s nothing, or to think they figured out the solution to a puzzle despite being led to that solution by hand.  Non-linearity is one of the grander illusions, and one of the more difficult to achieve- Tricking the player into thinking they’re carving their own path, even though they’re just following one of the paths the developer left for them.  It’s a balancing act between obscuring the trail, so the player finds it on their own, and revealing the trail, so the player doesn’t feel lost.  Non-linearity is essentially a lie every developer tells right to their players’ faces, but it’s an entertaining lie, and in the end it doesn’t really matter how much or how little control the player had over the progression of a game, as long as they think they had control.