Project Anabasis Development Diary #0 - The Future of Aurora

[Girdio]

Been away for about a year, but had been thinking about Aurora and spied this.

On the whole this looks like a really interesting change of pace. The server has for the last decade, and despite lore changes, overall been "megacorp focused". As mentioned elsewhere, I don't think the current setting lines up with the attitude or beliefs I've seen IC regarding the corporations. There has been a significant detachment of "this is a pretty bad setting to live in" from the lore, to how characters interact with the setting. Making the lore and gameplay interwoven hopefully will fix that significantly. The twenty-or-so year time skip seems pretty short for something of this impact, but I understand the necessity to avoid a complete reboot of the setting, and to let people keep their characters if wanted.

Personally, I believe that the lack of new players is a difficult-to-fix situation. It's been going on for years. I feel like it was a discussion even back in 2014-2015, with F_Sphere and everyone. The primary (or only) people know about the server is through word of mouth, for example. As much as I love the idea of an Aurora YouTube channel or Tiktok, I also know that's pretty unrealistic, as is paying for ad space without donations (and avoiding attracting TOO many people). That said, I'm hopeful that this will fix a significant portion of the issues of cliques/chair-RP that has established itself again. I can see a more engaging game mode being a good way to have established characters naturally interact with new players. It would incentive for established players to talk to new players as well.

My biggest concern is that with everything being persistent, new players won't be getting the same experience as players here for the initial change. While obviously the setting being largely "the same" gets stale, it does prevent players feeling like they've missed crucial points. Like yes, the events are always fun and rewarding but you can survive not seeing them.

From what's described here, it seems like everyone is working towards a goal of improving their lot in life. Making the ship look better, their overall situation better or whatever. How long does it take for that to go from the "we're struggling together" aesthetic to "we are comfortable and can relax". I feel like if there's no meaningful change to life on the ship, we're right back here talking about how everything is stale and nothing canon.

But then, a new player joins and they've missed out on all this. Sure, they have the goal of "you see what we've done, we can do even more!" and that's fun itself. How long would it be until new players were coming into a setting they couldn't influence anymore though?

My overarching question is that,  I think. Are there plans to address both letting the ship improve and change with time, but also preventing a situation where new players don't feel like they've missed out for not joining at an arbitrary date? Outside of "oopsie an asteroid crashed into the ship and now everything you worked for is moot, rebuild it, hehe"?

Also, I didn't see anything in regards to a timeline. I wasn't active when the server went from the Aurora Station to Horizon, so I don't know if a timeline was presented there. I see mentions of this being a several-years-in-the-making situation. Is there a current rough estimate of when everything would begin shifting over? 

Edited December 4, 2025 by Girdio

[Shimmer]

9 hours ago, Girdio said:

Personally, I believe that the lack of new players is a difficult-to-fix situation. It's been going on for years. I feel like it was a discussion even back in 2014-2015, with F_Sphere and everyone. The primary (or only) people know about the server is through word of mouth, for example. As much as I love the idea of an Aurora YouTube channel or Tiktok, I also know that's pretty unrealistic, as is paying for ad space without donations (and avoiding attracting TOO many people). That said, I'm hopeful that this will fix a significant portion of the issues of cliques/chair-RP that has established itself again. I can see a more engaging game mode being a good way to have established characters naturally interact with new players. It would incentive for established players to talk to new players as well.

Word of mouth is not necessarily a bad way to spread and attract new players - the issue with word of mouth is about retention and keeping a good enough chain where that kind of stuff spreads and keeps players engaged. Plenty of SS13 servers work exclusively by spreading through word of mouth, by attracting players from similar settings and keeping them engaged.

 

The issue with Aurora is that it's difficult to retain long term interest when the primary gameplay loop is just so fundamentally shit. Once the game itself is in a state where it's more fun and engaging, growing wouldn't be the issue it is right now.

[MattAtlas]

On 04/12/2025 at 12:22, Girdio said:

My biggest concern is that with everything being persistent, new players won't be getting the same experience as players here for the initial change. While obviously the setting being largely "the same" gets stale, it does prevent players feeling like they've missed crucial points. Like yes, the events are always fun and rewarding but you can survive not seeing them.

From what's described here, it seems like everyone is working towards a goal of improving their lot in life. Making the ship look better, their overall situation better or whatever. How long does it take for that to go from the "we're struggling together" aesthetic to "we are comfortable and can relax". I feel like if there's no meaningful change to life on the ship, we're right back here talking about how everything is stale and nothing canon.

But then, a new player joins and they've missed out on all this. Sure, they have the goal of "you see what we've done, we can do even more!" and that's fun itself. How long would it be until new players were coming into a setting they couldn't influence anymore though?

My overarching question is that,  I think. Are there plans to address both letting the ship improve and change with time, but also preventing a situation where new players don't feel like they've missed out for not joining at an arbitrary date? Outside of "oopsie an asteroid crashed into the ship and now everything you worked for is moot, rebuild it, hehe"?

Also, I didn't see anything in regards to a timeline. I wasn't active when the server went from the Aurora Station to Horizon, so I don't know if a timeline was presented there. I see mentions of this being a several-years-in-the-making situation. Is there a current rough estimate of when everything would begin shifting over? 

Sorry for the delay, but here are your answers:

1. We are not going to fall into the trap of infinite growth for persistancy, you can read about why in the newer dev diary with the Tithe. Any player coming in at any time will be able to influence the game.
2. The rough estimate is three years, but it's obviously not really easy to predict how much time it takes. Life can change a lot in this time.

[NothingNew]

On 07/11/2025 at 16:22, MattAtlas said:

Speaking of technology, Science will be reworked from the ground-up into a Fabrication department whose purpose is to collect data, relics, and lost technology from away sites, and reprocess this data into usable semi-persistent technology for other department. This means that if an advanced design is discovered, it will persist for a certain amount of rounds rather than immediately fading away. These technologies will be powerful and use limited resources, so use them wisely!

 

I admire the development teams' desires to improve the mechanical gameplay of Aurora but the changes proposed to the Science department are fairly detrimental to the Roleplay the science department provides; the biggest issue with these proposed changes is that you're intending to remove a department where players create their own character-defined experiments and goals and replacing it with a mixture of Xenoarchaeology and factory assembly. In doing so, you lose the variety provided by player choice, away sites where you have to mine or find specific components are okay for awhile, but when it comes to gameplay loop, you're following a set of limited instructions or blueprints to complete the task. It's very restrictive, the kind of Roleplay it would offer is much narrower and leaves no room for imagination.

To make matters worse, we already have a Xenoarcheology department. It would be much easier to rework this into the pre-existing mechanics without stripping its adjacent job-roles bare.

[ET0319]

Honestly, I hope that if the server goes to SS14, it'll revolutionise the game. After all, while yeah, currenlty, SS14 is a watered down version of SS13, I think the biggest reason why that is because everyone is like "Ewwww, SS14 too yucky and gross", and while it definitively has flaws, I also think that said flaws can be lessened if SS13's coderbase decides to rip off the bandaid and starts adding their favourite things to SS14. Will be there pushback? Yeah, there will be. But it would suck if SS13's playebase and features would become forgotten because the playerbase wasn't stubborn enough to not give a fuck about how SS14's community would react to actually engaging mechanics and implement them regardless. 

 

Not to mention that I believe it would encourage people to actually take roleplaying more seriously, with fun, in character ways to learn, and also to give IC requirements before becoming head of a department, like managing to succesfully co-ordinate a large scale defense force to become a sechead, having a great deal of theoritical and practical knowledge on how to heal others and the willingness to teach it to new medical people to become a CMO, so on and so forth. 

[zha everything broken]

It absolutely won't happen largely for the same reasons at we won't port the server to Unity or Unreal (fundamental cost/benefit tradeoff and complete lack of developer interest).

That's not to say that SS14 doesn't have a shitload of interesting and good underlying code that I'd cheerily kill to have here- my initial exposure to Space Station# was actually SS14, before I found and moved to Aurora here in SS13- but I don't believe you fully appreciate the scale of what you suggest.

That said, it also does us no good to sit in place either- there's a lot of really exciting stuff coming down the pipe here! I have a dev diary coming out soon that talks a fair deal about modernizing a lot of our foundational code and (probably more exciting to most people) a lot of the features coming out soon that it'll enable!