forest

where am i

This looks incredibly funny in the cohost image viewer

where am i

My friend group and I have a common term we throw around: "games for sickos". It's difficult to pin down an exact definition, but you know them when you see them: complex games that are fucked up in ways that make them prickly, or inaccessible, or frictional, but also fascinating to appreciate as a designer—and if you're the right kind of fucked up, maybe enjoyable to you too. It's a positive label, but it keeps in mind that a game is not for everyone. Armored Core is a game for sickos. Guilty Gear Xrd is a game for sickos. Pathologic is a game for sickos. Dwarf Fortress is a game for sickos. Final Fantasy XI is a game for sickos. And Space Station 14 is... well, you can guess.

Back in the early 2010s I played a lot of Garry's Mod DarkRP, which introduced me to the strangely compelling concept of working a virtual job in a role-playing environment where shit hit the fan every five minutes. I remember becoming a chef, decorating my cafe with my exquisite selection of props, and annoying everyone on the server by asking for money over the counter instead of granting direct access to the magic microwave oven that generated meals. Outside my front door, pitched gun battles took place and children screamed wild accusations at each other, but I was content to just be a background character.

Space Station 14 is that, but for absolutely terminal sickos.

So Space Station 13 (the game that Space Station 14 is an improved remake of) was made on the BYOND engine, and if you ever want to see the gritty insane underbelly of the Macromedia Dreamweaver era, go look up BYOND.

BYOND was a mid-2000s freeware game engine designed specifically for building multiplayer experiences. Think one part Bitsy, one part early Unity, one part Flash, and one part pile of decompiled Runescape netcode stolen from a dumpster behind Jagex' offices.

SS13 is by far the most elaborate thing ever built with it, but BYOND was essentially a whole treasure trove of games built in exactly these parameters: top-down, pixel art, debatably real-time multiplayer worlds for sickos and freaks who were too weird for the mainstream MMOs of the era but couldn't get with the preceding generation of MUDs and MUSHes.

Absolutely incredible era and someone needs to do a deep dive on it.

literally just typed byondinto my address bar and firefox pulled the post deep from the depths of my history

BYOND has just been through a big year of upgrades, after finally delivering SendMaps threading, updating external calls with Byondapi, and some other huge quality-of-life features that have been requested for a while. The next big hurdle is updating the embedded browser to WebView2, future-proofing it and ending our reliance on the outdated Internet Explorer. But this challenge and the others that come after it are gonna need more power, and they're gonna need some upgrades.

My current development system is going on 7 years old, which is an improvement over stretching my last computer to 11 years, but it's time to get updated. I'm looking to buy a new system that will help me keep churning along with development, as well as potentially unlock access to machine learning tools that could be invaluable as the landscape continues to evolve.

Since a new system is the biggest current impediment to WebView2, this is a necessary next step. Internet Explorer is going away, and BYOND's reliance on the embedded browser hasn't. Moving away from Explorer also will clear the decks for other improvements like updating the website, and I'm hoping that with newer hardware it will be even easier to move past some older libraries and technologies. Who knows what the future will bring? But it starts with you.

I'm looking to raise $2,500 for a new system that will include more modern hardware. By no means am I trying to put together a state-of-the-art gaming rig, but the goal is to be in good shape for the foreseeable future. Thank you all for your support. Long live BYOND, and mak gam!

The reliance on IE is one of the primary reasons the game is confined to Windows right now, since otherwise it works well under Wine. If you're interested in keeping the BYOND era going...