Introduction

2023 has been an incredible year that has met and exceeded our wildest expectations. In this blog post I will be going over everything that happened in 2023, and will also be discussing what our plans are for 2024 and beyond.

2023 - The Year of Open-Source & Surrealist

Chapter 1 - The Beginning of Surrealist

After discovering SurrealDB in late 2022, Starlane Studios began utilizing SurrealDB in almost all of our products. From websites, to planning tools, and to Minecraft servers, if it needed a database, we were and are still using SurrealDB. But with SurrealDB still being relatively new and undiscovered at this time, we ran into an issue. We came to the realization that there were no good visual clients for viewing your data or executing/exploring queries. So what did we do? We made one ourselves. In December of 2022, we began development on Surrealist; and only a few short days later, on December 13th, 2022 (exactly a year ago today), Surrealist version 1.0.0 was released.

Chapter 2 - The Rapid Growth of Surrealist

At the time we created Surrealist, we had no intention of Surrealist becoming popular. In fact, the primary purpose of this tool was for internal use by both Starlane Studios and Yaacomm. On a whim, we decided “Hey. Why don’t we make this open source? Maybe someone else might get some use out if it too”. From there, the rest is history. Surrealist started to grow exponentially, at rates that we had never achieved before, and started to get adopted by developers and SurrealDB lovers everywhere. At the time of writing this, Surrealist has been downloaded 8,757 times, and has received 611 stars on GitHub! We at Starlane Studios are immensely grateful for all of the overwhelming support we have received for this project.

Chapter 3 - The Future of Open-Source & Surrealist

After several months of deliberation and soul searching among the Starlane Studios team, and after re-examining our goals and priorities for Starlane Studios, we have decided to shift our focus away from open source projects. This might come as a shock to many of you, and this was a tough decision to make on our behalf, but we believe that the future of Starlane Studios does not currently lie within the open-source community anymore.

What does this mean for Surrealist?

Our move away from the open-source community will not effect Surrealist! We have no plans of stopping development on Surrealist and actually have a huge announcement to make regarding Surrealist in Q2 of 2024.

What about Comment Anchors and Starlane’s other open-source projects?

As far as Comment Anchors and all other open-source projects go (other than Surrealist), we plan to cease the creation of new open-source projects, and halt or slow down the maintaining of our current open-source projects (other than Surrealist). As sad as it may be, we believe that this step is necessary in taking Starlane Studios towards tomorrow (more below), and we also believe that this change aligns more with our goals and ambitions for Starlane Studios.

The Future of Starlane Studios - 2024 and Beyond

With the plan to cease the creation of new open-source projects, and the plan to halt/slow the maintaining of current open-source projects, you might be wondering what we plan on doing now. But before I get into what the future of Starlane Studios looks like, I must revisit some of the history of Starlane Studios.

For those who are unaware, Starlane Studios was founded on the basis of gaming; and many of you have played on our Minecraft servers such as ExodiusMC, Cubecade, or Smash Wizards. In fact, the vast majority of our current team members originated from playing on our Minecraft servers (including myself). Starting in 2018 and continuing all the way until May of 2021, our primary focus was always creating Minecraft servers, with the future goal of creating our own standalone games. However after discussions the last few months, we believe that the future we once talked about, is the present. Therefore, our goal of Starlane Studios for 2024 and beyond is to create games which are made by gamers, for gamers.

Starlane Studios - By gamers, for gamers

As we prepare for the the 2024 year and beyond, we will also be bringing with us several new team members. Over the next few days, we will be onboarding a team of incredibly skilled individuals, who are also seasoned gamers. Each of these individials will play an important role in aiding in our mission to create high quality games made by gamers, for gamers.

In addition to this massive expansion to our team, which will effectively double our team in size, we also came to the mutual decision that a new logo was necessary to correctly represent the new Starlane Studios vision. No, you’re not experiencing Deja Vu. As you might remember, we adopted the current Starlane Studios branding almost exactly a year ago to the day. But with that being said, we felt that our old logo was too representative of the old Starlane Studios, where open-source projects were the primary focus; and therefore, we sought something new that would be a better fit for the gaming scene. (See the new logo below!)

The new Starlane Studios logo

Closing Remarks

As we wrap up the final few weeks of 2023 and begin to enter 2024 as well as this new chapter of Starlane Studios, I would like to personally thank each and every one of our directors, studio members, contributors, and most importantly our community, for the continued support of our projects and our missions since our founding in 2018. I hope that each and every one of you continue to support us through our new mission, and through the crazy ride that we are in for in the 2024 year and beyond.

Be sure to keep an eye out for more frequent blog posts and massive announcements and updates which are coming very soon.

And finally, welcome to the Starlane Studios of tomorrow.