Happy Solar2Day!
Today we celebrate the third anniversary of Solar2D as an independent, fully open-source project driven by the fantastic community.
This date is a beautiful opportunity to express appreciation to the community. You are nothing but exceptional in supporting the project. Be it direct financial support, getting third-party developers plugins, providing friendly support to other community members, reporting issues, or contributing code. Solar2D is a community-driven project, and I am so grateful to the volunteers who stepped up to help the project and everyone in the community who continues to use it.
Brief notes on financials - we are pretty successful with the fundraising and have great sponsors on Patreon and GitHub Sponsors. We accumulated significant safety cushion to operate confidently into the future. Total contribution slightly dipped, but on average, we broke even, which paints Solar2D’s future in bright colors.
On a personal note, last year was not the best for me. While my family and I are safe now, it feels like something got damaged. I am managing quite well, but this led me to delegate more responsibilities to volunteers. It would help in the long run, at least improving the bus factor.
While the project is mainly focused on sustainability and maintenance, we plan several core improvements, allowing much deeper plugin integration into the engine. Which ultimately will allow us to integrate native runtimes and frameworks, like Spine, for example.
Many ask what the is the roadmap for the project and our priorities. The answer is to allow consistent quality and the ability to ship apps. So our focus is keeping up with Google and Apple changes. Apple just released Xcode 14.3, which was a challenge to integrate for various reasons, but it is available now. Google Play target API level 33 requirement is next on the ‘must do’ list.
Another highly requested item is game resource packaging and Metal support for macOS. Those are not forgotten.
And for the last - we wanted to announce that we would hold Solar2D Blitz — a lighthearted game jam with a hefty prize pool. Details are to be announced later.
Most of the action would take on our Discord, but you can also follow its Twitter.
Cheers!
Vlad Shcherban
Solar2D Developer
