10 Years of Space Station 14
Contributed by PJB3005
10 years ago, the standalone SS13 remake project was open sourced, and Space Station 14 was born.
I don’t really know where to start with this.
I discovered Space Station 13 almost 11 years ago. I was hooked, but always wanted a remake just as much as everybody else. People have always been upset at BYOND’s limitations, and that was just as true back then. The curse was already a meme at that point, but that never stopped people from taking their shot. And one of the projects that seemed to be making good progress at the time was called just “Space Station 13”. When I discovered SS13, I started following it, hoping it would one day be released. Of course, like so many other projects, it eventually died. Recreating SS13 is a massive undertaking, and the few developers working on it eventually got busy with their lives. Yet another victim of the curse, huh?
Thankfully, the devs eventually decided to release the project as open source, hoping somebody else would keep it going. The entire SS13 community got together to continue it, under the name Space Station 14. That happened exactly 10 years ago. At the time, I barely knew how to program. I learned C# just to contribute to SS14! But again, that didn’t last. Within a year and a half, Space Station 14, too, was all but dead.
So what did everybody do? We went back to dealing with BYOND. And sooner or later, we get annoyed with BYOND again, so we try again. Personally I went through multiple pet projects to try to move SS13 into a new engine: Unity, Unreal, C++, Rust. I didn’t know what I was doing, none of them got anywhere, but hey, that’s fine.
Around the start of 2017, me and some friends decided it may be the most practical to just pick up Space Station 14 again, because as far as we were concerned, it was further along than anything else. So we asked the last person with ownership of the GitHub repository, set up a Discord, and got to work. And now almost 8 years later, here we are.
I think it’s fairly safe to say that we’ve broken the curse at this point. Space Station 14 is on Steam! We have thousands of concurrent players, beating Space Station 13 easily. There’s a ton of varied servers, and every update, new, amazing things get added to the game. Sure, we don’t have all the features of SS13 yet, but I think the game stands on its own regardless.
I would like to seriously thank the entire community for getting us here. Every coder, admin, and player that has been with us for the past many years. All of the people that chose to contribute to SS14, even when it was years away from being playable. We could never have done it without you.
Speaking personally, this has been a very long journey, and I’ve learned and improved a lot. It’ll always be kind of shocking to me that it’s been 8 years since I’ve started working on SS14 for real. Before that, I’d been spending most of my time playing and contributing to SS13. That only lasted about 2-3 years. It feels like it was longer than it is, but speaking objectively, it is definitely a blip at this point.
And, of course, we’re not done. Not me or the rest of the project. On the game side, every time I play, I can think of things to improve. On the project side, it has not been an easy ride having our project gradually scaled up to thousands of players and hundreds of contributors. We have a lot of work ahead of us, and in a way, it seems just as insurmountable as it did 10 years ago.
But there’s one big difference. 10 years ago, if you’d ask me “can we do this?”, I’d just say “eh? whatever”. Now, I can definitely say: “yes”, and we will.