Not how we expected to announce



"just really the fumble of the century, trynna be cautious bcause its always a sensitive topic, forking, and then *ass bare against the hull* **FFFRRTPPP**" -warc

background
So like, one of the things that is probably good to do when starting a big ambitious game project is to keep it under wraps until you have SOMETHING to show for it, right?

That takes time, and if you announce it prematurely you end up with a big story outline and some concept art of a guy with a small mug and a huge boulge and no game. We didn't want to build any hype until we figured out we had somewhere to go and something to present. So this new SS13 project was fairly hush-hush for the week and a half between "actually yeah let's stop talking about it and do it, i'm feelin' good and confident, let's register a webs site and get a crew together" and the reveal of a fateful Thursday.

There is a certain delicacy delicateness required before broaching the whole "yes hello remember us anyway we are now doing a fork that kinda rolls things back several years so like, are we good???" topic with the upstream project's originators. We were hoping to get a decent and professional relationship repaired and going to share code upstream and ideas and the like, once we had more progress and could better signal some good intentions and not just come across as a spiteful ripoff.

the thing
So some reverts are being done to bring back the previous set of sprites after Goonstation had a major, ambitious, and successful project to overhaul every mob and clothing and held item to look more modern. This isn't at all the primary reason for the fork, but it is part of the "classicization" that we had planned with stamina removal and all.

Trouble is, there was weade afoot. Instead of committing to the Coolstation fork repo, a very Christmasy PR was made directly to the Goonstation repo specifically about reverting some of the new sprites. Their GitHub PR bot announced it to their Discord, out of the blue; it was the first contact in MONTHS. the description of the PR and what it was doing to their big project would understandably come across as some weird passive aggressive dunk but it was not (we must stress it was 100% a weade mistake)

we were made, cat was out of the bag, and people (by which we mean including Goon staff, by which we mean including Wire, the head dude in charge of things!!!) joined the coolstation discord to see what the fuck was going on.

the aftermath
It uh, seems to be okay and cleared up now and some potential misunderstandings and offense are cleared out and it's a funny ice breaker in retrospect. but this is not how we expected any of it to play out., like at all

thank you goon for having good humour and patientse because holy shit man

this was not how we expected to announce