Update Inbound
2025-06-27For three hundred days, Jax Calder endured the hellscape of Bromius III, a wet barren rock scoured by wind and acid rain, where rusted metal groaned like ghosts and the sky never broke from its ashen shroud. Alone among the skeletons of the mining colony, he survived on emergency rations and grim determination, his only companion a failing environmental suit and the dim hum of a battered terminal he’d dragged into shelter piece by piece. Day after day, he worked—rebuilding the antenna from scrap, coding blind into cracked screens, shielding circuits with his body during electrical storms—until his hands bled and his breath stank of recycled air.
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Sleep came in fits but he was trained for this. And on the three-hundredth day, the terminal lit green. A signal broke through. And just before the storm season returned, a dark shape pierced the clouds—sleek, and familiar. Just in time for Summer on Earth.. -- What some of you might remember is that AO was originally a game called Zoo Base. And that Zoo Base was inspired by Star Zoo by Bay12. Fun fact - it wasn’t just inspired by it but we even got permission to directly call it a spiritual sequel. Then everything got entirely too overthought. In an attempt to distinguish AO from predecessor Zoo Base. In hindsight that was a bad idea. Which is not to say that I regret doing that. It’s just that with the state of the industry being what it is, there is a new kind of clarity hitting a lot of folks who have been indie for far longer than expected. I think a lot of us are coming back to thinking about what fun is. Since like the tech industry as a whole there was a lot of problem solving of things that didn’t really need fixing. A lot of reintroductions to the wheel. And while the results are still valuable, I think a lot of engineers are figuring out how to apply those lessons and new technologies in a way that isn’t so heavily R&D. Right now the server is (still) down in preparation for V7 - expected before July - which should put AO on a clear track to be exiting early access within a few subsequent patches. The game itself is being simplified because it actually outgrew itself around the time of the Linux announcement. Which itself was marred with issues and quietly delayed and unknown outside of Discord. More on all that in the next one!
