Hey everyone. We’ve been having our fair share of problems in getting the forums and rest of the site back up after the hackers had their way with us and we do appreciate your patience while we work through them. The whole thing has taken a lot longer than we anticipated and to make matters worse, the site downage also meant that we lost our main source of funding. It’s probably not obvious from the outside, but Constellation donations have been my main income and have enabled NS development to continue (otherwise NS development would’ve stopped part-way through development of NS v2.0). Development on NS:Source has been predictably slow during this time as well.
Since our funding essentially dried up, it caused a ripple effect to the NS team. Karl "XP-Cagey" Patrick was working full-time on the site and some future code and suddenly that couldn’t be sustained. So now Karl is off working at Stormfront Studios and we’re left with a site that is essentially complete except for some mysterious time-out bugs and a couple loose ends. It’s working well enough to be used privately for the developers and playtesters, but if we opened it to the public we’re afraid we would have to bring it back down again due to these problems.
So what we are in dire need of now is a PHP/MySQL programmer that can rapidly get up to speed on our code (which is very clean and well-organized) and kick butt over the next week or two to fix these last issues. If desired, we would also love this to be a full-time (although unpaid) position and would involve adding new community features and integrating more tightly with the game. We have lots of ideas for how we’d like to improve it and if we had a dedicated programmer tasked to it, I think the whole community would appreciate it.
If this is something you are interested in, PLEASE e-mail me immediately (jobs@unknownworlds.com). If it looks like a fit, we’ll have you sign an NDA then get you access to the code base ASAP and you can get cranking. The NS team and whole NS community would really appreciate it.
In more upbeat news, we have gotten some very serious inquiries by investors recently and are following up on them. We are also in the process of choosing a CEO for the company. If and when this funding comes through, we will be able to get that office, hire those first key people and make some major announcements about our future games! After two years of looking, it looks like our persistence may finally pay off. Furthermore, we won’t have to beg the community for free help because we’ll be able to hire someone full-time. 🙂
In summary, things have been a bit slow these past few months but our future is starting to look very bright. Thanks for hanging in there and being as patient as you can!