Posted by huck (etc.) on May 28, 2025
hello everyone! as this quarter's Abnormality wraps up, i'd like to give a little status update on where i've been lately!
firstly, i've been working on Toyhouse again! there isn't a whole lot of character information on here but it has gotten me illustrating again to get used to Krita. here is a sample of what i've been cooking up:
(drawings not to scale)
a couple of these refs are for characters i play as in Space Station 14, a roleplay disaster simulation game.
you might've heard of its predecessor, Space Station 13, which has a reputation of being cartoonishly violent, mechanically complex, developed (with great effort) for a very old game engine, and having a steep learning curve. SS14 is a remake of this game on an independently-developed game engine that lends it a lot more stability and (arguably) ease of development.
i also think space station 14 is designed to be a lot more intuitive than 13 - there's actual accessibility in the form of rebindable keys and an in-game guidebook instead of relying on a wiki! this game has been a huge, um...
...yes, so, i started playing this game last year and it has an on-off stranglehold on my mind. whoops!!
so, the gist of space station 14 is that you are a single crew member on board a space station with everyone else on the server. your goal, broadly, is to do your job, interacting with a tiny slice of the game's vast array of mechanics. you are also roleplaying; you are playing a character with their own appearance, goals, personality, and skills. you're basically pretending you're at work with everyone else on the crew, and your job may entail asking for help every now and again.
over time, the round gets more and more chaotic. "antagonists" may enter the scene (players whose goals lead to havoc for the crew), parts of the station may be caught in explosions and attacks, and the departments will spend all their resources in trying to do their jobs. after a certain point - usually ranging from 2-4 (real life) hours - it becomes untenable or undesirable to remain on the station, and the evacuation gets called, ending the round. then you do it all over again, with a different roster of characters, jobs, and map.
the game allows you to jump into the round at any time, and leave at any time - though on many servers, leaving the round is one-way and you can't rejoin (as you could carry information about station conflicts to your next character from the ghost chat, which can be undesirable). in addition, the chaos may lead to violence and death. there's many departments - service, medical, cargo, engineering, security, science, command. it's a whole lot of fun!
SS14 is kind of unique for a video game in that every server uses a self-contained copy of the entire game's code. this allows every SS14 server on its "hub" to effectively be a different game, and each "fork" of the official repository (Wizard's Den) features its own mechanics and contributions. and all of them are open source, meaning that anyone can contribute to them quite easily!
i would heavily recommend SS14, especially if you've heard of SS14 and thought it would be way too difficult to get into. everyone in SS14 i've seen has been pretty helpful teaching new players and i've gotten maybe a dozen different people into it who now know how to play this game at this point.
sorry for hard-shiling this game in my comradery post! all of this is leading up to what i have been doing lately - a lot of volunteer development work for this game's various codebases! i won't tell you where i'm at now for the sake of my own privacy, but here is a snippet - a pull request i've made adding new plushies for the server "Delta-V" to represent each of its uniquely-added species. art by me!
i'm doing these contributions to SS14 for free because i'm in it for the love of the game, but do consider supporting me if you like what i do.
- vyn 💾