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 2023:
Thrive
In 2023 there were 5 releases of Thrive, which is slightly less than the usual. The first of these releases was 0.6.1 and the last one was 0.6.4.1. The reason for fewer releases was the ECS rework that took the time of 2 releases. We had 32 open source contributors contributing to these releases, which is two less than in 2022. The association had one full-time employee, who used most of their work hours on open source development of Thrive. The versions released in 2023 so far have been downloaded a total of 31,434 times for free through Github, which is about 10,000 less than for the releases in 2022. This could mean that the trend with less engagement with Thrive is continuing. 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 only had one minor release this year (2.0.3). This version only had one developer contributing to it. We had a few more people working on the translations, but seeing more programmers contributing to the launcher would be good. The reason for just one release was that the only developer working on the launcher had an issue with their development environment not being able to debug the launcher for most of the year. So far the one launcher release in 2023 has been downloaded a total of 43,473 times. That is about 20,000 less than the launcher releases one year prior, which paints a similar picture as Thrive downloads. This difference likely won’t be compensated for if we account the downloads through FlatHub for the Linux version of the launcher that is not counted in the GitHub numbers. What probably explains more of the numbers is that as we had fewer releases, active launcher users didn’t get auto updates for their launcher version at all, which would have increased the download numbers.
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 as well as Discord integration features. This project had three contributors this year. Most of the code was still done by a single contributor, though. Even if not a core part of the Thrive gameplay experience it’d be nice to get more volunteers helping out 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 have contributed some feedback and some code to the engine in the past. This was a pretty quiet year in terms of interacting with Godot contributors, but next year is expected to be much more busy with Thrive moving to Godot 4 and encountering all sorts of new problems with the engine.
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 235 new users register in 2023 (about 50 fewer than the previous year) and a total of 14.8 thousand posts were made (about 5 thousand less than previous year). This is a relatively significant reduction in community activity.
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. After growing quite a lot the growth levelled off in early 2023 and since then the Patreon page has been slowly shrinking.
Closing Thoughts
In terms of association operations the year 2023 went smoothly thanks to the association operating for many years already. The day to day activities and impact on Thrive was not very different from 2022. This year was the first year the association had a full-time employee who was mostly dedicated to open source work on Thrive. Thanks to that there was quite a big increase in the amount of available development effort going into Thrive. The 2022 year-end-report hoped for a continued growth of the Thrive community. Sadly this doesn’t seem like it has happened, instead there has been a small decrease. If the situation continues we cannot afford to continue indefinitely having a full-time employee working on Thrive. Hopefully we can turn around the situation and try to get Thrive back on an upwards directory. Perhaps with renewed focus on finishing the microbe stage of the game soon could gather renewed interest and energy? 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.