POST-MORTEM: Moon Universe 2 has been DESTROYED

We have had a very exciting "Season 2" with the destruction of the universe (aka Universe 2), in a little story we called "To the End of the Universe". It has been 9 months - and it happened exactly on the date we announced in the very first post.

We tested some new things this season, and more new development is continuing - read on for more information!

Players competed in what seemed to be quite a cutthroat season, and over 9 months powers rose and fell, until there were a few powerful players and one giant monster. That said, the "win conditions" were not about points, but about creating moons and being the first to colonize certain solar systems.

Full list of 39 winning planets coming soon.

One of the more interesting and fun tools that we built - a Solar System Destroyer Tool - now allows admins to precisely destroy entire solar systems or even entire galaxies - while automatically taking a database snapshot as a backup. We even put the backup to the test when I accidentally deleted a galaxy in universe 1 (for just a few minutes).

While it may not be immediately obvious - one of the exciting things for me about this game - being an open source codebase that we recovered and improved, is that not only are we upgrading it for future games, but also the very codebase itself is being upgraded in the open source spirit for all future developer-minded folk who might want to spin up a universe for their friend group one day.

Now it might seem pretty easy to "destroy", and in many ways it is. I certainly thought it should be, but the destruction of galaxy 1 nonetheless came as a shock to me, when lots of manual work and talking to players was required. No two interactions with players is ever the same (sometimes being literally opposite), but the specific case came up of a player who had decided to pay no attention to the "story", and just wanted to click buttons (and I totally know this feeling); And despite having gone inactive in universe 1 (the one that wasn't exploding), they decided they wanted to do it again in universe 2. The noble @hivetrending spent some time recovering and moving their planet into a safe zone, where they were free to go inactive at their leisure shortly thereafter, bitter and alone.

But this brings up an important point - this season surprised me in multiple ways.

Surprise

When communicating about the game in Season 1, I mostly used this blog, a hive blog, to write out and explain the things going on - the work behind the scenes, the rules and reasons, as well as "what's next". Upon announcing the first winning coordinates on my blog - several players brought to my attention the fact that this was a bit "unhinged", a real warning should come in game where the active players themselves would see them, and an inactive player would not.

It's "not fair", is the claim, for an inactive player in the game to see the blog, and become active again with information that the actual active players haven't had a chance to see yet. Now, I'm not that worried that everyone or anyone things the game is "fair" - but this actually did hook me.

It makes some sense, a lot of sense, and so I changed the workflow - though as a consequence this is the first blog I have posted about Moon since then. All future information about the destruction and winning coordinates came through the in-game messaging system - which I honestly do think was more fair. The final two winning coordinates were released approximately 12 hours apart, hopefully giving a wider opportunity to players in different time zones.

May 19th was indeed total chaos - the type of chaos that I imagined when we designed this story last year. I hope it was fun, it definitely stirred some movement both in game and in the discord - and finally "season 2" is over and we can once again think about and work on "what's next".

Speaking of working, I feel like I have to take a quick intermission to mention how face-melting @hivetrending can be when he gets into a groove:

I spent some time responding in discord to the player feedback, which left the universe 2 "open" in an easter-egg period for a brief time after the snapshot was taken. But I felt good, finally having found my safe and healthy mental space somewhere between the two unhealthy extremes of "I don't care what players think" and "What players think is the most important thing even when they are clearly saying opposite things".

After another few days, I totally and finally obliterated the "easter egg" universe 2 post snap shot, using the tools we had created. There was no actual benefit, outside of having fun, to click any buttons after the final snapshot was taken, and the final obliteration took this doubt off the table.

Final Results

Finally - we have the snapshot and there are 39 planets to identify, and move such planets to universe 1 under their player's accounts. This may take us a moment, you are welcome to continue or begin in Universe 1 at any time, our goals are as follows:

• Planets moved, with fleets landed at the moment of snapshot.
• Research on the account married to the highest achieved between both universes
• "over-cap" planets possible, meaning you could have more planets than theoretically possible, but upon deleting one there is no slot to recover until players are down to their actual limit based on tech

Additionally, I have been looking at the Moon Creation list, for the PIZZA End of Season rewards - so far so good, we have identified 68 moons created and eligible for prizes.

I cannot give you a date - but these are the next things!

We have tons of ideas, too many in fact, for future rounds. Participate, chat, opine and stick around if you like this type of game - now looking better than ever on mobile and in your browser!

Freedom and Friendship