This is going to be a very different post than we are used to. Its going to be a long one. Because I’m honestly very mad. So before we get into all of our stuff, let me address the fire in my voice.

My career in code started over a decade ago with WordPress plugin and theme development. I spent the better part of my career in that world, and there is a soft spot in my heart for it. That world introduced me to open source, to the idea of people working for the bettering of a community as a whole. And, for those of you that don’t already know, that world is on fire right now.

I don’t want to get into all the details about the what is burning or how we got here. However, I do want to make my stance clear. This is my rooftop to scream from.

When you make a project open source, you surrender your right to that being your life’s work or your passion. You are selflessly giving that project to the world. Moreover, you give that project to the world and expect nothing in return. That is what it means to be open source. You give anyone and everyone the right to fork, change, manipulate that code to their will, and you give the community to right to guide the future of the project or fork when they disagree.

What we are seeing with the current state of WordPress is a completely irresponsible series of actions by those give the responsibility of controlling the future of WordPress.

Back to the Pack…

54 Games

There has been some active communication about the future of 54 Games. As Bombseeker moves closer and closer to release, do we want the future of 54 Games to be adding content to Bombseeker and growing that game forever? I think that the answer to that is no. I have been reaching out to external parties and gathering opinions about what our future should hold.

Its going to be a balance. I don’t want to be stuck only maintaining one game. The idea behind Bombseeker was that we were going to use it to learn. Then we can move onto other projects and continue to grow. However, we do love the project the Bombseeker has turned into. We’ve created lore and stories for the universe. We’ve created a history with emotions. I don’t think that Bombseeker is venue to ALL of that to be expressed.

There are going to be more games, and those games are going to continue within the Bombseeker universe.

Bombseeker

Lets start with the admin stuff. We are creating a playtest for Bombseeker on Steam currently so that we can get the game into the hands of more people. There is yet another review process and that is taking time. But hopefully we will get past that soon. Once that happens, I will reach out to those who have joined the discord.

It hasn’t been forgotten that this game was meant to be simple and just a puzzle game that was highly replayable. However, I have lore that I was to explain to the player. Because of this, I want to have a skippable intro cutscene that explains the history of the universe for the game. This is what we are working on while we wait for the playtest to move forward. Of course I am drawing the art for the beta theme. And its awful.

There have been conversations about including three people on the project to fill in some gaps that I have. The first is a designer for asset development. The second being a voice actor to be the voice of cutscenes in the game, primarily the intro cutscene. Lastly, a musician to produce some audio for the game. However, **zoom in at my empty wallet** I still don’t have money to pay people, so there’s that.

OS Pack Man

OS Pack Man is a new project that I have started thinking about as a result of the conflict in the WP space. I want OS Pack Man to be a centralized repository for WordPress plugins, WordPress themes, and other packages that are open source or for open source projects. For this project, we will refer to WordPress plugins and themes as packages as well.

The Importance

With the WordPress plugin and theme repositories being controlled by a private party who can cut off a subset of the marketplace from access to those packages, it is essentially making the entirety of the ecosystem unstable with a self destruct button. By creating a centralized repository in direct competition with the WordPress(dot)org repository, that isn’t a mirror but instead a separate entity, we can create a healthier ecosystem for WordPress as a whole.

The Value Provided

If the WordPress repositories vanish, then the alternative as of now is to pull packages from GitHub or other public resources. Of course, there will be the mirrors that exist, but the moment new versions need to be released, the mirrors become irrelevant. At the that point where you are downloading public resources, you lose the security that is provided by the auditing that goes into the WordPress repositories. One of the benefits of OS Pack Man existing is that it will have some level of auditing. The details have yet to be ironed out, but there will be a lot of automated auditing.

Lyte Software vs Rogue Wolf Tech

I wanted Lyte Software to be a place to publish Open Source software projects. Meanwhile, Rogue Wolf Tech was to manage Saas projects. So where does OS Pack Man fall? If is definitely involved in the open source world, but at that same time it is a platform that will most definitely have to make money t osupport itself and may fall into a Saas model somehow.

There seems to be a stronger desire for this to fall into the Lyte Software category. I think that this desire stems from the altruistic nature of the project. This project isn’t about making money, this project is about providing alternatives to a bunch of developers and designers that need a safe place to publish their projects.

Conclusion

While we want to continue to work on Bombseeker, this has been a distracting week. All of the drama within the WordPress community has made it difficult to focus. Every day we move forward as best we can, but because of this, we have a desire to add another project to our list. But my heart tells me that its important because my heart is heavy for all of the plugin and theme developers that our affected by this. Today, this sign off is directed at you.

Go Forth and Stay Awesome