Hello everyone. I am here with an update or more of an announcement about Survive the Wild, and sadly it is not good news this time. The short of it is that after a couple months during which players can enjoy their store bought items, Survive the Wild is going to shut down for the foreseeable future. The store will be disabled within no more than 7 days after the publication of this post, target date for store shutdown is this Friday. If the game ever does return in the distant future, it will not be in a beta state and will retain all data, at such a theoretical time we would pick up all of the pieces such as choices of January 11th inventories, dealing with credits purchased during the beta etc. The remainder of this post will describe what finally lead to this decision.
Lots to fix code wise
There are several blog posts that talk about the various broken aspects of this game, so I won’t spend much time on them here other than to point it out as one of the major reasons we can no longer keep the game online. Fixing these various problems is going to take months of attention to the code without any distractions being caused by the running game, and that doesn’t even touch on all the plans we had begun to form regarding actually giving the game much more replay value such as with human npcs, buildings and much more. Of course if the actual work was the only problem, this post would not be getting written.
Limited manpower
Survive the Wild has had staffing issues for years, even when we do find someone trustworthy to add to the team we tend to either find little time to train them, or there is a massive change to systems following any training (such as RTig to Angelscript, slash commands to administration UI etc) which renders much previous training much less useful. We cannot keep this game online until we resolve such staffing issues. Currently the game is playable so long as a player doesn’t run into an issue, but as soon as they do, getting support from staff is often very difficult and frustrating due to lack of available team members, a staff member’s lack of knowledge about either system or procedure, or sometimes bugs in the new staff UI that render a moderators job much more difficult than intended.
Conflicted morals
Here is where we begin to enter the real crux of the issue though, the final straw that broke the camel’s back as it were. If the following situation existed apart from all other issues, we’d be able to get bye.
It started a little over two months ago when it came to our attention that a certain very charismatic stw player might potentially pose a risk to minors on the game. It’s possible that this person might be luring kids to an off-game server of some sort where some weird and inappropriate behavior could be going on.
So what’s the problem why don’t I ban them and have done with it? Because the allegations against this person A, come from a quite trustworthy source but B, have very very little supporting evidence which I could classify as proof against them. I won’t go into the details of what I was told but it was concerning to say the least. So that’s already bad enough. I know there is a potential nefarious character on the game, but especially since much of the nefarious activity is likely to happen off game I cannot just ban them with no proof. Sadly though it gets even worse because one of the things I was told was that apparently one of stw’s staff members told the nefarious player that we were investigating them, which of course was confidential information. Another betrayal from the staff team, even if potentially unsubstantiated, was a huge blow to my already extremely crippled morale. Since just about everything involved in this case more or less amounts to word of mouth from friends, I have no way of gauging the actual seriousness of these claims and don’t want to overreact. We can try talking to the player in question, but as I said first they are extremely charismatic and second the issue came up of not wanting to expose to this player the names of the people giving me the information on them. We could examine chat logs, but lately that situation is a mess because of the beta and more.
I’ve already been struggling for years trying to figure out what kinds of messages I should and shouldn’t log on stw and who should have access to those logs. Though I was sadly a bit more reckless about this when I was younger, I began worrying about invading people’s privacy combined with more and more systems being recoded, and fewer and fewer chat events were getting logged. I’d actually come up with a good solution to the message logging issue that would be noninvasive to privacy while also being secure and tamper proof, log messages on clients with a way to spit out the log with server generated message hashes and more, was going to write up a good privacy policy finally etc, but I just never managed to finish all that stuff and this happened now not later. Really the lesson in the end is that you make a privacy policy saying that you log all chat events and that, paraphrased of course, with all due respect you should use signal if you are trying to communicate something private. This is a game with kids on it who could be endangered by unsolicited communication from other players, and that hardcore trumps any concern about privacy when chatting on a *game* even when sending a pm, which exists for convenience and which boasts no additional security or privacy features beyond not broadcasting that particular chat packet to other players than who you intend to talk to. I came to that conclusion a little late though I guess, live and learn heh.
In the end, I feel thoroughly trapped by this situation. Every second I keep the game online, I’m knowingly exposing young impressionable kids to someone who just might, according to unsubstantiated reports from a trusted source, be at least somewhat dangerous to them. This knowledge has been constantly grinding on my spirit and has caused me much distress over the last couple months. But then to add a just as unsubstantiated potential staff betrayal is really just too much. And the final nail in the coffin was this. I told the masters that this staff member might have leaked confidential information, to which a response I got was something along the lines of “We really shouldn’t demote this dude because we already have too few staff members and it would do too much damage to the game.” Wow, well that makes things pretty clear doesn’t it. Given the fact that manpower/energy is too limited to properly deal with the situation, my options are to shut down the game or to leave it running knowing full well that a staff member might be leaking any amount of private information at any time, moreover to someone who might possibly be endangering minors. Why would I keep a game running knowing that someone possibly dangerous to kids is running around while a staff member leaks information about our investigation to them? I do, after all, have a conscience. Also I’m so utterly tired of this kind of thing, I’m more of a programmer than a people person and not only does this situation put me out of my depth, but I’m too depleted to deal with it anyway, it has me far too depressed and disabled to lift a finger to fix it.
God’s opinion
So I apologize if this section gets strange for some readers. I don’t usually talk about my religious beliefs publicly somewhat because I am a young enough christian that I still have some fear of judgement from others due to my beliefs, but also because they are still developing way too rapidly for me to describe well. I’ll try not to get into it much here and will only describe situations that directly happened which influenced the decision to shut down stw. Even writing this much at this time is weird for me, but genuinely I feel like I’d be giving a somewhat dishonest or incomplete account of the situation if I did not mention these events.
Lets start with the server crash in February last year. Because it’s really weird, I didn’t mention this potential cause when describing the server crash in blog posts last year. All I know is this. On February 2nd (a little over than 24 hours before the crash), I was really really depressed about stw. At that time in particular the thing pushing me over the edge was a case of data corruption regarding somebody’s character on the private beta server. Me and the masters were already talking about shutting down stw’s public server at the time due to different but also similar staffing issues back then as well as general stress regarding trying to manage and develop the game at the same time. Anyway something about this data corruption was some sort of last straw for me back then because I got very mad and proceeded to shout something which I began regretting less than 5 minutes later, “God help me I don’t even want to be paid for this sh*t anymore!” Though of course as I calmed down I began to again remember how grateful I am for every credit purchase on stw and realized what a dumb thing I said, the simple fact is that there was some heartfelt truth to the angry statement at the time. The shear amount of stress and mental fatigue stw was causing me was genuinely unhealthy, and even if no part of me wanted to admit it, I knew deep down that I was ready for a break from the game even if it meant no more incoming payments. I consider it a certainty that God heard me, because just a little over a day later the freaking SSD on my server fails and what do you know I’m no longer being paid for stw heh. Having already experienced God moving in my life several times before this point, there was absolutely no way I was going to interpret that sequence of events differently. First was the contrast of feelings letting me know that something good happened. A day previously I was so mad I was trying to avoid becoming a danger to myself just because a beta member’s character got corrupted during testing, but then when the entire infrastructure blows up in a spectacular and unrecoverable digital fireball a short time after, I somehow just pretty happily got to work fixing things after the initial jolt of admittedly not entirely unpleasant surprise. Other reasons I know it was God’s work is because for example I’d just moved from an apartment to my parents house again, meaning that I was no longer paying over $1000 per month on rent. Had this ssd failed 3 months earlier, I would have been in serious trouble. God was also trying to get me to save money in a couple strange ways months leading up to this crash. In November of 2022 for example a Christian radio station I listen to was doing their help a child in need in another country thing they do a couple times a year. My Mom had done it before and it’s cool because it’s personalized, it’s not just some generic collection bin. You select a child to support from the beginning and pay a certain amount monthly to help them with food/lodging/education/more, and you actually communicate with them over the years as they grow up. I decided to give this a try, but managed to mistype my credit card information (which I don’t do all that often). I attempted to retry but was presented with an amusing and unfriendly looking sql database error about how an insertion constraint failed because a row in the database already existed with my email address, and at that point decided to classify that endeavor as unsuccessful and moved on with my life. I found it funny because I just happened to be implementing SQLite into stw at the time and so had just recently learned in detail the exact meaning of that particular error message. Shortly there after (in December of 2022) I tried making an order from sound ideas that contained several libraries. The process worked right up until I pushed the checkout button, where my browser then informed me that the connection to sound-ideas.com had timed out and that the page could not be loaded. The first thing I did was to verify that other websites would actively load, it wasn’t my internet. I tried refreshing and reloading sound ideas several times and it remained offline for me. A friend called at that point and distracted me from making the order at all, though a few hours later I successfully made a much smaller and less expensive version of the order. That was weird though, take spirituality out of it and one could easily wonder at how me pressing the checkout button on sound ideas managed to seemingly crash their entire server! In February of 2023, I was suddenly very much thanking God for the weird disruptions to my financial spending after my server exploded like that. Indeed by the time stw came back online months later i was desperately trying to decide what to do, cancel my charitable donations or withdraw my ever dwindling holdings in crypto currency. In the end I spent such an annoying hour trying to cell my crypto which wasn’t doing well to begin with that it’s gonna be a really long time before I try investing in that stuff again lol. Anyway, without those disruptions to my spending that took place before the server crash, I’d have been in a truly uncomfortable situation. That crash also caused us to finally fix our bad character backup practices, it was perfectly timed after the last rudimentary data download 3 weeks earlier such that we lost enough data to make fixing the backups a serious priority while also not losing so much data that the game was unrecoverable. Remember how I mentioned that we were more reckless with data logging earlier on in the game’s history? The crash also conveniently destroyed much of that older data such as private message logs that we’d never asked permission from players to collect with the usage of a privacy policy. So yeah, that’s the untold part of the story behind the 2023 crash. I very strongly believe that the word coincidence cannot even remotely be applied to that situation, it contains far too many hidden blessings and happened at far too perfect a time.
And then just a few days ago, though without the data loss, it all happened yet again! The circumstances were somewhat different and it was much less aggressive, thank goodness I don’t need to spend a bunch of time rebuilding my server. But this above mentioned staff betrayal situation had been going on for a couple of months and I had already been considering shutting the game down pretty much all that time. Finally, though another part of my mind was trying to retract the prayer as I thought it, I just prayed “Ugh God if you want this game shut down can’t you just do the server crash thing again?” Well, the server crashed again or more specifically suffered a network failure that was out of my control a couple days later during the first time I was on tt with a master in about 2 months. Vultr had to fix it 8 hours later. In the physical world I could imagine that perhaps Vultr suffered very minor effects from the cascading outages of certain large cloud database providers that took place that day, but spiritually speaking I would feel quite illogical if I interpreted this event as anything other than an answered prayer. A good 98% of my spiritual experiences are like that, there is almost always a real world explanation to them and only their combination combined with prayer and faith turns what would otherwise be completely random coincidences into very weird God moments that make me facepalm and question to myself how little I truly know about reality. This 8 hours of network outage happening at such a perfect time is an example of such a god moment, finally cementing the fact that it must be best to shut down Survive the Wild for now.
Will the game return?
Honestly I have no idea. Certainly I am making no plans at the time of this post, which though very sad will also be extremely relieving. It’ll be nice to wake up and not have to tend to the same project I’ve been working on for 10 years, constantly feeling like I have something to fix while rarely feeling like I have the energy to actually do it because some administration or logistical rather than coding issue is bogging us down. For the past couple years every time I get a payment from stw I’ve felt a strange mix of gratitude and sadness, gratitude for obvious reasons but sadness because I haven’t felt like I’ve been able to truly deliver on the good game that people are supposed to be paying for for quite a long time now. It’ll be good to have a break from that feeling. One thing I can say for sure though is that I don’t plan to delete any data. If the situation allows and if God has something else to say about it some time later, I’d love to finish fixing this game and watch all the dreams I have for it come to fruition. I have the source code, the January 11th inventories and all of the data gathered during the beta period over the last year, which luckily happens to contain a very comprehensive bug report and suggestion database such that if the game does reappear, it’ll be in a much much better state than it is in now, certainly the beta phase would be over to say the least. But I don’t know for now, after shutting this thing down I plan to spend as little time thinking about Survive the Wild for a while as I humanly can, and we can talk more about restoring the game after the desire to just not think about it anymore has been fulfilled enough to no longer be a concern. As to what will happen to the Survive the Wild discord server? I mean I see no reason to destroy that community, people can either leave or make it thrive as they wish if other stw staff agree to keep moderating it. After all if the game comes back, we’ll need a place to announce that fact.
It’s been a wild ride yall
Everyone, genuinely thank you from the bottom of my heart for sticking with the game, that goes for both staff and players. I think it’s safe to say that there have been many positives as a result of this project over the last decade, from countless memories and hours of fun and relaxation on the expected end to changed lives, forged relationships and even a BGT rewrite on the unexpected end. I suppose all things considered, that really isn’t bad for a game’s lifetime.
As for me I plan to keep working on NVGT, and will soon probably begin seriously trying to seek employment or something. Lately I’ve needed at least some game to code in NVGT so that I can use the engine as well as creating it, and as such I’ve been working on rewriting constant motion and am happy to say that the nvgt version begins to resemble the python concept demo more and more, soon I’ll just be working on individual minigames in that project rather than the infrastructure. I’ll generally be around, I’ll probably come up with something or other to post on this blog as time goes on.
Since I cannot deny that it would be helpful, I’ve opted to leave the store running for just a few more days encase anyone wants to provide any final financial support or just wants to get a few last minute credits to have some fun before things start shutting down. The store will die sometime this upcoming Friday. Another very deep thank you to everyone who has ever purchased credits on stw, you guys should know that your support allowed me to live independently in 2 apartments in 2 states over a couple of years, your purchasing of credits on this game has genuinely changed my life. Because of your support I now have enough sound effects for life to make any game or audio production I could possibly imagine, and I thank everyone of you for every blessing I was able to experience as a result of your digital purchases. Anyway, Survive the Wild will shut down a couple of months after the store does, so that everyone can enjoy their most recent purchases. I apologize if the staff situation continues to deteriorate even further however during these final months of gameplay.
Well, I think that’s all for the last Survive the Wild update post. I’m sorry that we did not manage to achieve our goals and end up with the game we were all hoping for, but none the less am very grateful for the countless lasting blessings that have resulted from the Survive the Wild project. For those who do so, please pray for the game’s return! And now with a very heavy heart I say fair well, and seriously, thank you all for playing my game.