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Erm!? What? I'm 38 now - doesn't that mean I was 28 then? I was absolutely convinced I was way younger...
Spring survived the doomsday prophecy that SupCom would kill it, then SupCom 2, then the map Speedmetal, then Starcrap 2, then Planetary Annihilation.
It started as a remake of oTA (XTA) but then it started to morph into an engine allowing decent map making, fuelling many different "mods" and eventually even becoming a platform for AIs.
It underwent many different gameplay phases, spawned Speedmetal, Chickens, DeltaSiegeDry (I rate the map DSD as a game-style of its own, just like the "map" Defence of the Ancients created a game-style of its own inside Warcraft 3).
It underwent different groups of people leading it. It sadly fragmented its player base (and to some extent its developer base) into Zero-K and NOTA. Yet, it still endures, evolving over time.
If Spring had remained exclusively a remake of oTA it would have ended up more polished and less fragmented but it would have died out by now. Starcraft 2, Dota, LoL are examples of how games, to keep themselves alive over time, keep changing to keep delivering players something new to discover and learn. I guess one of the keys that kept Spring alive has been its development "hobby" aspect, where people just take developing {whatever} as their hobby and then just stick along at their hobbies, retaining those developers and keeping creating new fresh stuff for the players.
Me, personally, thanks to all contributors who've kept this boat afloat all these years. I hope the future brings good solutions for some of the issues preventing Spring from being even more awesome than it currently is.