This is an annual report for Revolutionary Games Studio ry for the main / most important things that happened during the year.
Main Projects
Revolutionary Games Studio ry supported the development of the following open source projects in 2022:
Thrive
In 2022 there were 6 releases of Thrive. The first of these releases was 0.5.7 and the last one was 0.6.0. We had 34 open source contributors contributing to these releases, which is one more than in 2021. The association had one part-time employee, who used most of their work hours on open source development for Thrive. The versions released in 2022 so far have been downloaded a total of 43,435 times for free through Github, which is about 20,000 less than for the releases in 2021. This could be due to the fact that Thrive is also downloadable (after a small payment) through two digital game stores. Or this could also just be that we had less engagement for our releases. All of Thrive’s source code has been kept on Github where the programming development workflow also happens in the public. The Thrive releases have been staying small enough so that they could be uploaded to our Github page, where they are freely downloadable by anyone.
The versions available through Github for free and the versions of Thrive made available on digital game stores were all supported with simultaneous new releases.
Thrive Launcher
Thrive Launcher is a project to help in downloading and playing Thrive. The launcher had a major reimplementation (2.0.0) this year, which transferred it from the Electron framework to using Avalonia GUI framework and C#. The first release of the year for the launcher was 1.3.0 and the last one was 2.0.2. Developing these versions we had just one person contribute to this open source project. We had a few more people working on the translations, but seeing more programmers contributing to the launcher would be excellent. The versions of the launcher mentioned before were downloaded a total of 62,960 times. That is just a few thousand less than 2021. One likely thing causing the impact was that the Linux version is now on FlatHub where users need to download it just once (or can directly even install through FlatHub) and then further updates go through there instead of showing up in our download numbers.
The new Thrive Launcher has been a big improvement to the previous version. The launcher has reimplemented all of the previous functionality but also added some new functionality. Some of the new functionality is specially only required by the game store versions of Thrive.
ThriveDevCenter
ThriveDevCenter is an open source project that has various tools and features for helping in Thrive development. It also has features related to Patreon rewards distribution. This project had only one contributor, but still multiple updated versions of the software were made and deployed to our production servers. Still it’d be nice to get more volunteers interested in improving this web application.
Godot
Godot Engine is an open source game engine, and the engine that is used by Thrive. The Thrive developers contributed some feedback and some code to the engine. Though, not all of the contributions have been accepted yet.
Community Platforms
The association continued supporting the community platforms and tools used for Thrive development. These were: the community forums, developer forums, Discord servers, source code repositories on Github, Thrive’s SubReddit, Thrive Wiki, community translations site, Revolutionary Games Studio’s website, and automatic code checking servers related to Thrive development. Association members or other volunteers selected by the association acted as moderators and administrators for these services keeping them running and as a good place for everyone by moderating the discussions. The community forums had 293 new users register in 2022 and a total of 20.8 thousand posts were made. This is a slight increase in new users and a more than twofold increase in the number of made posts when compared to the previous year.
Patreon
The association continued running the Patreon page made for supporting Thrive development. Exclusive content was produced to the members of the Patreon page and they got access to the Thrive development version (DevBuild) distribution system (a ThriveDevCenter feature) to get Thrive versions early, other benefits were also offered, access to DevBuilds and other benefits depended on the selected membership level on Patreon. The Patreon grew quite a lot in 2022, but the growth levelled off near the end of the year.
Closing Thoughts
2022 was the first full year of operation for the association. Thanks to already having operated for a while the year was smoother in terms of association operations, but the day to day activities and impact on Thrive was not very different from 2021. Other than being able to offer more development resources there was not much difference. This is because even before forming the association the community around Thrive had already operated for years before that. Overall the year 2022 was not that different from 2021 in Thrive development, but we did see a lot more income and other support from the community. In the future we hope that this direction will continue and Thrive will keep on growing. We want to thank everyone participating in Thrive development or even just being in the community around the game this year and showing your support.