![]() This is an old post but there's two things I think killed it:īyond's heyday was before digital distribution of games and specifically phone games were a huge thing. I know one of my old House of Morte buddies (any ya'll still here? lol) tried to drag me back in a handful of years back. If I had a little more time and a little fewer responsibilities, and some of the folks I knew back then were still around, I'd probably get back into it. ![]() I'm also pretty sure LummoxJR is happy because (last I saw) nobody ever turned off the monetization component to BYOND. but they used it because it had the best overall feature set for their goals back then.īut then there's the dedicated community of gamers that's still sticking with BYOND, largely because it's what they know and many of them probably don't have coding backgrounds otherwise. It could've improved with a lot of breaking changes, but anyone with a serious coding background who used it could tell you that it had inconsistencies. The DreamMaker language really is bad, from an objective point of view. ![]() There are hundreds of sites like Kongregate out there that'll let an indie developer get access to gamers. There are hundreds of mature gaming libraries, most with 10x the developers of BYOND and focused on just rendering games. I lead-dev'd a moderately successful game there in 1998 from my college dorm room.Īll the open source languages have drastically improved since then. It also promised to gift you with a pool of players from day 1! When it first came out, its feature-base was actually very unprecedented for developing small-scale indie multiplayer games. It was arguably everything that made it popular in the first place that doomed it.Ī very well-written custom DSL (Domain Specific Language), written and maintained by small number of people. To simplify, for people "more in the know" about the workings of BYOND's community, what exactly caused the (admittedly small) userbase to go nearly die out?īYOND was doomed to a slow decline a very long time ago. ![]() In turn, it raises the question as to what exactly killed BYOND? Of course, SS13 devs constantly complained (and probably do) that BYOND is horrid for coding, but for games that had a general stable setup and didn't change a whole lot, it seems strange for an entire playerbase to up and vanish. This trend is non-unique to just these games, and the only games that seem to have survived besides SS13 are other pure RPG/MMO games. The Last Conflict, Wargames, CowRP, the trio of anime-inspired murder-mystery _ High games all were such intense fond memories and all except TLC lay dead and abandoned (with TLC barely hanging on with 3-15 people playing). That said, there are so many games on here that at one point was so incredibly popular and outright enjoyable. Of course, like many people I was really into SS13 (probably played it seriously from 2010-2017ish?), and for obvious reasons, it's still the only "popular" game really left on the site. One site that kept me entertained for so long is BYOND. ![]() Recently, I decided to take a minor "nostalgia trip" down my old browser games and the like. Given how dead this subreddit is, this oddly feels like throwing a message in a bottle, for someone to eventually stumble upon and ask the same question. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |