Hey everyone! It’s been a while since the last post, so I wanted to update you all on what’s been going on with regards to my personal life, and how it will affect the project going forward.

The Good News

So I had a plan for what I was gonna do after attending GodotCon 2024 in Berlin (which was amazing by the way, Berlin is an awesome city!), which was pretty much gonna be the same as before: work on the game as much as I can, and get a pre-release of v0.2.0 out as quickly as possible. However, within a few days of coming back to the land of tea and crumpets, an opportunity suddenly came up…

Putting a long story short, after a very long time trying, I have finally landed a full-time job!

Now, I can guess that a lot of you already have an idea of where this is going…

The Bad News

So I’ve been in this job for a few weeks now, and while I consider myself incredibly lucky to have gotten this opportunity, I need to be realistic about what I can reasonably do outside of work and how I can do it while avoiding burn-out.

TL;DR: Going forward, I am simply not going to have the time or energy to work on Tabletop Club full-time anymore.

This unfortunately means that, realistically, v0.2.0 will probably never see the light of day, which feels especially bad to say considering the fact that it was hopefully going to be a great update to the game.

However, I am not saying that I will never work on the game from now on - if any game-breaking bugs or crashes suddenly appear, I will be sure to fix them and release a patch for the game. I’ll also make sure that multiplayer continues to work for as long as possible by keeping the lobby server up.

Plus, I will also keep the various official communities active, such as Discord, Matrix, and the official forum. The game will continue to be playable, and as such, I will still provide support on these platforms, and there will still be players who share their custom asset packs.

Donations

One thing I also wanted to acknowledge is the donations I have received so far: Firstly, I wanted to give an absolutely massive thank you to everyone that has donated to the project up to this point, both on itch.io and Ko-fi. I genuinely thought I was gonna get, like, £10 at most, but the amount of generosity I have received has been absolutely mind-blowing. You guys are amazing!

Secondly, I have taken the decision to shut off future donations. With having a job, income is no longer going to be an issue for me, and I will barely be working on the game as is, so it feels wrong to ask for further donations.

Thirdly, I also wanted to mention that if you donated to the project with the premise that v0.2.0 was going to be released, or you generally feel that your donation is now invalid, then I will be more than happy to refund it. If this is the case, please contact me at drwhut@gmail.com using the same email you used to make the donation, and I will refund the donation to you as soon as possible.

The Nature of Open Source

If there was one decision that I am especially glad that I took before starting work on the game in 2020, it was making the game open source. Not only because I am a huge advocate for open source software in general, but because if it was closed source, I would have had to abandon the project altogether.

Plus, if the project was open source, I genuinely don’t think the game would have gotten as much traction as it did, considering there are lots of, frankly, much more developed alternatives out there, such as Tabletop Simulator and Tabletopia. The fact I made Tabletop Club open source made it an alternative to these projects, which I am incredibly proud of.

Which leads me to my last, but probably my most important point of this entire post:

This does not have to be the end of Tabletop Club’s development.

Due to the very nature of open source software, any one of you has the ability to take the code I’ve written, do literally whatever you want with it, and make it your own. You could keep going in the direction I was going, or you can do your own thing. Literally the only condition you need to adhere to is to keep the copyright notice from the license, that’s it.

If you do end up forking the project, then please let me know! Not only would I love to see what you end up doing with it, but I would also be more than happy to help provide Godot-related support, and if I have time I might even help contribute to the code!

Thank You

Considering this game started out as a hobby project during COVID, I still sometimes catch myself off-guard looking at the statistics… I never, ever expected the game to get as popular as it did, and for that, I want to thank each and every one of you for your support. It genuinely means the world to me, especially so when I was at my lowest mentally. COVID hit me really hard during university, and it got to a point where I thought I’d never recover.

From everyone that helped me playtest the game, to everyone that donated, to everyone that contributed code, to everyone that translated the game into 14(!) different languages, to everyone that made asset packs and shared them, to everyone that shared screenshots of what they were making for the game… Not only did you help the project directly, you also helped me as well. Seeing the reception this game received gave me a huge, and much needed, boost to my motivation and confidence that I sorely lacked post-COVID.

And with it, I can move into the next chapter of my life knowing that this was, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the best decisions I ever made.

I literally cannot thank you guys enough. You’re the best <3

Oh, and one last thing… did you know that there are two easter eggs hidden in the game that no one has discovered yet? :)