Hi all. So that I don’t bury the lede: Beneath the Nexus is entering an indefinite hiatus.
For some of you, this may be a “well, duh” announcement, and for others, it might come as a total shock. Rather than allow people to wonder and speculate about how + why we’ve arrived here, we wanted to instead provide you all with the history of the project, the things that were harder than anticipated, and the issues that block us from continuing to work on it.
History
When Revenge of the Fallen was shut down in 2019, we agreed as a team to take the skills and experience we’d acquired running a relatively successful (albeit unsanctioned) multiplayer fangame, and put them towards a first-party, standalone project. This idea quickly—for both legal and design reasons—evolved from a basic re-skin of Revenge of the Fallen to a completely re-imagined game, with several core design pillars on top of our “multiplayer roguelike” base:
- build diversity/experimentation
- even more fast-paced and arcade-y
- less MMO, more moment-to-moment
- more party-focused (play with friends)
- more procedural generation/emergent gameplay
We moved forward with these pillars for nearly two years, eventually releasing our first publicly available version of the game: our first session of Closed Testing (sometimes called CT1 or the Winter ’21 playtest). From a stability/technical standpoint, it was a massive success… but from a gameplay standpoint, it largely failed. Our smaller, procedural overworlds were boring; every biome “felt the same;” players mostly only engaged with our longer-form, precisely crafted dungeons.
Here’s how we interpreted these findings: continuing to push in an arcade direction wouldn’t resonate with players, so we should try pushing more in the opposite direction, towards more MMO-like design.
With the benefit of hindsight, this was a major mistake. We needed to refine and re-design our game to more successfully apply those design pillars. Instead, we changed the game’s direction entirely, all because our first attempt at an implementation of those pillars was poor.
We moved away from procedural generation, massively increasing our cost of development. We needed a more powerful world editor to support the creation of these new hand-crafted worlds, and thus incurred another development cost. We needed more sprite-work, more 3D models, more sound effects, and more enemy behaviors, trying to build out a massive world map of content. The scope of the project quickly grew out of control.
Why we’re stopping
Although the project’s uncontrolled scope is largely responsible for its multi-year development time, it’s not the sole reason for the project to enter hiatus: if there were no other issues, we could pivot back towards our original, arcade-y, procedural-first direction, create clear deliverables and timelines, and ship a product that we were proud of. Unfortunately, the actual issues that pushed us towards this development hiatus are harder to correct: issues of leadership, funding, and burnout.
Let’s talk about all three.
Leadership
In June, I shared this message with the rest of the team, expressing doubts about continuing to operate in my capacity as a director:
These doubts were exacerbated by the technical challenges of creating a multiplayer game. Making the wrong choice—going down the wrong path—costed even more in development time than in almost any other project I’d worked on. I was too uncertain to create extremely detailed plans of game systems, mechanics, story, lore.
I don’t think that I was any more competent in the past—I just wasn’t as scared to push in a singular direction without looking back. Now, as I thought about the funding that we had (read: basically zero); as I considered the work that I was asking people to do; as I counted up the hours that people would have to contribute—all to realize a vision that I’d never be certain would be the right way forward (let alone make enough money to pay everyone fairly for their time)—I struggled. I no longer felt comfortable asking people to follow my direction without being able to compensate them fairly.
…which brings us to funding.
Funding
We don’t have funding.
The result is that our most strenuous, time-consuming work must be compensated via equity, which felt fair enough early on in development. Now, several years into the project, I’m not so sure.
And although our commissioned/contract work was compensated, I wasn’t satisfied with the amount of work that I had to ask of them. I was even less satisfied with the timelines that they were working towards. But I was least satisfied with the amount that I was able to pay for that work.
I knew that these were the terms the team agreed to; I knew that I was the person taking on the most expenses and thus the most risk; but I still couldn’t help but feel anxious and uncomfortable with continuing to direct our team under the dream of future financial success, even if everyone else on the team was still comfortable with these terms.
Obviously, the most ideal option would be to Have Funding. We’d talked before about ways to do this (crowdfunding, publisher, patreon, combination of any), but we’d require things like a good vertical slice (and the aforementioned, finalized list of timelines, deliverables, etc for the game) to have any chance of making those funding options successful. This, again, would require leadership and direction that I no longer felt capable of providing.
Burnout
Although we have been pretty quiet about the amount of work being done on this game, I want to take this moment to pronounce: Beneath the Nexus was under active, exhausting, full-time development for multiple years. Even during prolonged periods of official silence, hours of programming, design meetings, spritework, and animation occurred every day, with little time to breathe. We were trying to build an MMO-scale game with an indie-scale team.
Together, we built: a networking library for multiplayer & several abstraction layers on top of it, an advanced world editor, shader code & effects for tiles/particles/others, behavior scripts for combat encounters, thousands of sprites & animation frames, a vertex-based collision system that allowed our mostly 2D game to interact with 3D models in a deterministic way, an asset server that could hot reload many of these things for faster iteration, an in-game party system, chat system & guild system, a database server to coordinate requests from game servers and web servers alike, a web-based API (i.e. for character trackers) & a WebSocket-based event notifier (i.e. for Discord bots)—both of which could be used by third-party developers—and so much more.
While I can’t speak for everyone on the team, I started to experience terrible burnout symptoms during 2023. With the other two issues as kindling, collective exhaustion and burnout symptoms acted as a spark. We thus initiated conversations about entering a hiatus and discontinuing work on Beneath the Nexus.
Farewell
So we’re (indefinitely) closing up shop. Everyone that’s worked on Beneath the Nexus is immensely talented, and it seems like right now, the most productive thing for everyone to do is use that incredible skill to find other (read: better) work, and garner official credits/experience working under industry veterans.
With that in mind, I wanted to leave some space for each team member to share a little from their perspective. They have worked so hard, and while I imagine that there’ll be some amount of anger surrounding this announcement, I sincerely hope that it doesn’t reach them. They’ve done nothing but pour their hearts into a grueling, multi-year project that they, more than anything, want to see released.
Despite being the literal trash at the game, I’ve had a blast working on both RotF and BTN over the many years and have made many great memories with everyone. Despite taking this necessary break, I—and I’m sure many people on the team—still share the passion to bring BTN and its world to life, so I truly believe we’ll all be able to dive Beneath the Nexus once again in the future.
Quaximi
Hi everyone, patpot here for the final time for a while. I just wanted to add on to everything that has been said and give a personal thank you to every member of the community that has supported the game in their own way. From rotf to btn, the community has always been the driving force behind this team and I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to work on this game with all of these amazing, incredibly talented people without everyone’s continued support. You’ve seen us through a lot through the years, and I hope we can do all of your support justice when we are all able to work on this project again. Working on this game has been one of the greatest experiences I have had and I am excited for the future in which we can finish it off and complete our vision, and until that time comes, I’ll see you then.
“So that’s what things would be like if I’d invented the fing-longer.”
-Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth, Anthology of Interest I
patpot
Hey guys! BQ is here. 🐸
I’m not a good talker. But I would like to express a lot of love and respect to the community and developers. Shaking all your virtual hands for you patience and devotion!!!
This project gave me a ton of experience, acquaintances, real friends!
On BTN project ive touched bigger size sprites for first time and animations for them! And WOW I won’t lie It was a real step out of my comfort zone! I’ve definitely grown as an artist here!!!We may not have achieved all our goals, but… for me personally, it was a fun adventure with a lot of positive experiences! 😄
it was a pleasure working with you!
BLOODQWEN
Honestly im really going to miss the team, this has been my first “real” work aside from like one mobile comission and I’m really happy that I made it into the team. I was a kid at last year of high school and when I first got a message from mini asking to join a team. I felt noticed. I was also very fucking scared when we were first working on respriting assets and i was constantly dreading that deadlines are not going to be met and I will be left out. That feeling intensified after the community reacted to what was presented so I thought that’s the end of it. Then you guys just said fuck it, we’ll do it again.
Fear of failure was constantly my biggest enemy and main reason why i was never able to really share art, only able to show off “successes”. You guys kind of helped me to self reflect on that problem because its one of those that has simple solution but you never do anything with it because confrontation is unpleasant. I might have slipped into that hole once again over the years but at least this time i kind of understand how to navigate myself out of it. Anyways, this experience gave me enough confidence that im not going to die hungry on the streets if i chose to become an artist istead of spending resources getting bachelor/major and never getting a job in that field(I might’ve broke a family tradition of getting a not so useful major). So i guess im chillin rn
Foucs
HELLO, it is Shmitty. I guess it’s time for btn to go, atleast for now. I really enjoyed my time here, and I am not exaggerating when say I will carry this experience with me for the rest of my life. Joining the team was a shock at first, and while it took a bit to get used to things, the team was incredibly supportive. Throughout my time here I have grown incredibly, both as an artist, and a person. I have so many memories I couldn’t fit them all here, but I think the most memorable times were during the closed testing sessions. Deciding on a final date, working hard to get everything finished in-time, then finally releasing and testing them with everyone are experiences I wont forget. Working on the Avalanche dungeon was also very fun—though it never got to see the light of day. The Avalanche contains lots of satyrs, and I honestly consider my animations for those to be some of my best work. I have actually been given permissions to link these, as well as some other bits and pieces, so yall can look through if you’d like :D.
https://www.pixilart.com/shmitty/albums/satyrs-334576
More on my experience in the team; for the first few months I was very shy and awkward, and would never use a microphone during meetings. I would always stream my progress showing myself typing in the same text file, “rotfmeeting.txt” (now btnmeeting.txt), and I would do this for almost every single meeting. It took so long for me to get a working mic to the point that, today, this text file has over 23000 words, and 130000 characters—which is INSANE to think about, considering I would often forget to save it, or I would just speak rather than type. Though I am unable to give the document itself (for obvious reasons lol) I have attached a few highlights that I thought adequately summarized what the document looked like.
It’s honestly crazy just how drastically the course of my life was altered when I first decided to play rotf in 2016, or when I played rotmg even before that. It might sound cliche, but If I had never become part of the community, it’s unlikely I’d have met any of my current friends, let alone even touched pixelart in the first place. Playing rotmg led to playing rotf, which led to becoming active in the community, which lead to meeting all of my current friends, which led to making pixelart, which led to joining the team, which led to years of fun experiences, which leads to now. Butterfly effect is crazy man, and I’m sure many others in this community might agree.
I could go on forever about various things, but as this is long enough already, I’ll conclude things here. My experiences on the team have given me tons of happy memories, forged lots of friendships, and helped me grow more confident as both an artist and a person—and I am forever thankful to both the community and the team for these experiences :D.
Shmitty
Mike chose not to share a reflection here, but he’s already written a lot on our Discord. Like us, he wishes that this hiatus wasn’t necessary.
Looking Forward
Not having a publisher does come with some silver lining—there’s no single backing entity with the legal/business authority to kill our project outright. You may have noticed that some of our reflections included language like “… when we are able to work on the project again.”
For longtime followers of the project’s development (that’s you, reader!), it will be most practical to think of Beneath the Nexus as a canceled game. There is no timeline for a return from hiatus; we’re each occupying our time with other work and commitments. I’m working as one of two Game Engineers at a small London startup backed by Riot Games; Pat’s making software that’s seeing real-world use in factories. None of us have the bandwidth to do anything else, so we don’t intend to for a while.
But I’ll admit that our studio (aced games llc—and Beneath the Nexus by proxy) represent a not insignificant investment of time, work, and in my case, money. It would be shortsighted and costly to drop those investments entirely. Years down the line—ideally after we’ve built a history of shipping successful games and products—the game’s future is less clear. Maybe we begin raising money through any of the aforementioned funding strategies. Maybe we massively reduce + solidify the game’s scope. Maybe we push the game to a successful release.
Or maybe we don’t.
Thank you
Writing this announcement was more emotional for me than I expected. I started working on Revenge of the Fallen in Summer 2017, and on Beneath the Nexus in Fall 2019. That’s a long time.
I will never forget:
- the great guild hall massacre
- trying to fight nyx with the team for a devlog and getting rolled for hours before we finally won
- hunting for hyporos alts, suddenly stumbling into vaults with hundreds of cheated handcannons, and finally banning that rat (i’m sure there were more accounts but still)
- our “thread-safe random” which actually just gave all items a 100% drop chance, leading to the biggest db rollback we’d ever done
- adding a market tax to reduce in-game inflation, and seeing someone post a picture of my house in response
- watching players make videos demo-ing the new primal items
- summoning three hundred players into a single arena for “stability testing” after every patch (it turns out that this is not actually how you do QA)
…and you know that I could go on and on. I am so, so grateful.
Thank you. ❤
~mini
aced.gg 