We took advantage of Solarus Labs yearly meeting to make a retrospective of what happened in 2020, and what are the upcoming projects for Solarus in 2021.
We created exactly one year ago Solarus Labs, a nonprofit organization to legally support Solarus. So far, it has only served as a legal way to receive donations. We hope we'll be able to organize some events someday, but the pandemic postpones this again and again.
Solarus had two releases: 1.6.3 and 1.6.4. They brought a better macOS support, better stability, and first and foremost: a free and open-source tileset by Max Mraz, called Ocean Set.
Solarus goodies began as a joke, but we actually made them real. Eventually, we sold some and it helped us pay the server fees.
Christopho made a video hommage to Bob Ross. He parodies the famous painter while creating a map in Solarus Quest Editor.
The community is bigger and bigger, and everyday more involved. Solarus got a lot of love from its community:
Solarus made some buzz for multiple reasons:
Some Solarus games have quite buzzed (both by Max Mraz):
For all these reasons, we can say Solarus reaches maturity.
Some projects have not progressed a lot:
We always have lots of projects for Solarus. Here is a list of what we would like to achieve in the year to come, and later.
Solarus 1.6.5:
R
Solarus 1.7 2.0:
Knowledge transfer:
Game development:
Goodies:
In order to give you the best transparency, we decided to open the Solarus Labs Git repository to the public. This is where we store the source for the organization documents: legal status, meeting notes, etc. However, it's in read-only mode: forks and merge requests are blocked. Only the board members are allowed to edit the files.
Despite the not-so-good circumstances, 2020 has been a great year for Solarus! Thanks for all the community members. 2021 forecasts great things too: the release of Ocean's Heart might bring new people to the community.