DBRP IS BACK!!! http://www.byond.com/games/NightSparrowMystia/DBRPmystia

The game should be about ready to come up again in the next 24 hours or so! We added a new feature in that's been requested for quite some time by staff and a number of players.

what happened to this game?
is the game dead?

Where are we now?

Yo, what happened to this game? Lol How long ago did it go under? I doubt anyone even still checks this but figured it was worth a shot. It's been a long time but I missed this game.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169540.0 look at screenshots here

Probably not, this game will probably never come back. It sucks, kind of, I miss this game now that I've been away from it for so long. Lol

I still have a somewhat out of date copy of the source code that I may release in packaged format.

The game went under because...Well, to be blunt, I got tired of how shitty the people on this platform are. Not everyone, mind you. Or even most people. But the people that are on staff in many games and run the platform tend to be unhelpful at best and outright malicious at worst. This was just one of many issues however.

To give a cliff notes version of the post-mortem for the project as it stands:

We spent years working on this project only to hit a development bottleneck (Part of which was due to some interesting issues with Byond itself on the back end.). We later found out that the problem wasn't even our fault. Though it took -years- to get to that point.

Then (and keep in mind this occurred during it too, slowing things down even more as we constantly had to divert from working on the game to fix whatever the latest little drama-llama situation popped up.) we had to deal with -constant- Game of Thrones level politics from other game owners and various other people trying to slow down development or outright steal the source code. Seriously. It was ridiculous. It was like people were trying to do their best Littlefinger impression 24/7. Vale and I started this to make a game for people to enjoy. Not to play internet politics with jealous nerds. Suffice to say that constantly having to deal with their antics made progress slow to a crawl.

To give an idea of it, my day for easily a year and a half to two years could have been boiled down to "Log on, get ready to code, either see someone trying to do something to hurt the game and it's playerbase or get a heads up from one of the heads of staff and promptly have to divert to dealing with the situation.". Coding came in those precious moments when I could escape from the game itself. Which is really a sick irony when you think about it.

Worse still, the game was attacked at least once due to exploits in Byond's basic code. For instance, there was the in-service DDOS issue we had years back before project went on hiatus. Situations like this meant that we literally -had- to divert from coding new features to figure out problems that we really should never have had to deal with in the first place.

Byond was less than helpful on the in-service DDOS issue as well up until it started affecting other games. Nor did they ban the guy responsible for the attacks after he revealed how he was doing it. A certain amount of apathy on their part became a running theme, to my increasing frustration. After awhile it honestly felt like we were unwanted by the service despite being one of the few high population games left on it that was helping to bring people in that might donate to keep Byond going.

Of course, the guy who executed the attacks kept causing problems for years down the line.

Likewise, on top of that we soon encountered a "null error" issue that halted development and forced us to divert from adding new things in to fixing it as it was crashing the game on the regular. It took years to figure out why the game was doing that and fix it since the debug methods provided could literally not track something so fundamental to the engine itself. Again, we received little to no help on Byond's end.

It ultimately turned out that that bug wasn't even anything we had done. It was on Byond's end. Not that anyone actually listened when we tried to point that out.

All these issues and more contributed to the perception that Vale and I were doing nothing when in fact we were busting our asses to fix problems that weren't even ours to begin with. Which Ginseng/Aaron later capitalized on (More on that in a bit.).


At some point during all this Vale began quietly suggesting we take the game off of the service and go fully independent. His reasoning being that it was becoming evident that Byond as a service and engine was unreliable on multiple fronts and that the mounting issues could eventually cause serious issues for the game, it's player base, and ultimately it's continued development.

I argued that we should stay as we had put quite a bit of time into the project on Byond already and starting over independent of Byond would mean literally having to start over from scratch on top of dealing with a host of potential (and likely expensive, never a good thing for an indie labor of love) new issues.

I also pointed out that going completely independent would have it's own perils that we'd have to work through. That would mean spending constant money on advertising to ensure new players came in and getting the project to at least beta status (This one was still open alpha. Hence some of the old assets as placeholders.) before releasing it. Something that was certain to kill the general population and cause issues for the player base in the meantime.

And that was if we didn't get interference from outside the game in the form of game owners trying to scalp people off. I also wasn't sure how Byond itself would react to us taking a large chunk of the population off of the service.

This remained a point of contention between us up until Vale quit. Honestly, having seen how things would go at this point I wish I had taken his suggestion.


Things came to a head after Ginseng was hired. Ginseng was hired to do some code work on a probationary basis so that Vale and I could finally pivot away from bug fixing and maintenance and focus on designing the bigger features people had been clamoring for. To our surprise and (and initially, confusion) he immediately locked us out of updating the source code for months on end by pushing as many new updates live as he could in a short time without updating the hub the code was on. This effectively made it so that we'd have to redesign all of his new features if we kicked him out and tried to restore update parity.

Valekor (The other main coder aside from me.) for his part slowly went from requesting Ginseng upload the source so that we could do our jobs, to teaching him how to upload it when Ginseng said he didn't know how, to displaying increasing frustration and then unbridled rage that Ginseng -wouldn't- upload it when the charade dropped on Ginseng's part. This took place over a few months before Valekor eventually quit over not being able to do his job.

Not helping things with his frustration was me initially vouching for Ginseng's trustworthiness (Again, Gin insisted he just didn't know how to upload his code to the hub, despite us teaching him multiple times. I took him at his word and was patient with him as a result.) through this due to working with him on a previous project. Boy was I wrong about -that-.

Couple this with Ginseng eventually going forward with trying to steal the game out from under us (an act that lead to him breaking a contract he signed with us -and- releasing the source code to screw with us after his original plans fell through) on top of Byond's management doing nothing to put a stop to all of that despite sending out a C&D and I eventually was forced to admit that it wasn't worth my time to bother with the service any more. Work put on here is simply not secure in the long run due to how it's managed.

To make things even more annoying, when we did get a copy of the updated source (Which had to be leaked to us by someone.) we discovered that most of his additions were just copying and pasting and re-branding our pre-existing code in a way that showed up differently from the player's perspective. Which means that a lot of the work we thought he was doing at the time...Well, he wasn't. It was basically a con meant to fool both us and the player base.

As a side note, you can see what I mean about the code being stolen with that "Psi-Forged" game Ginseng is making. It's his second attempt at it and according to multiple people is using the same assets from SE. Incidentally, some of the art assets were licensed from big name companies. Meaning he's stealing from multiple artists and developers.


All that being said, I did intend to come back to this prior to this point. Then someone burned my house down. Which...Y'know, kind of had to take priority. My family and I nearly died and we lost -everything-. We're talking, "sixty seconds later and we would have all been incinerated/burned to death in bed" levels of a close call.

Even with the lucky break we had in getting out (I was awake at the time, thankfully. If I hadn't of been...Well, that would have been it I guess.) I lost both of my pets. I saw one of my cats burn to death and failed to save the other one. Been trying to deal with that, among so many other things that happened that night.

To give an idea of how bad the situation has been; the next day saw me walking down the street in my pajamas while on a borrowed cell phone trying to assure everyone I knew that I wasn't dead. All while reeking of burnt wood and having a few burn and soot marks from the fire on my body from trying to get everyone out safely.

So...Yeah. Kind of been dealing with all of that, and the trouble that came with it.

I do intend to come back to this one day. And maybe I will. But for now I need to focus on real life.

How's life now?

Man I miss this game. Admined several years on and off on the servers. Was a lot of good times. Just reading now what happened Archonex and it is sad to hear, hope your life is better now.

Still would love to see it return in some way in the future if he ever decides to do so.