Solar2D Third Anniversary!

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

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Three years since Coronalabs folded and these forums were full of concerns from developers needing to decode if they were jumping ship or not. I think you’ve proven yourself pretty epicly @vlads . Kudos!

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thanks to you too @vlads , thanks for all of your work!

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3 years already? Looking forward to 3 more!

a bit more support towards PC and HTML5 in the following years :slight_smile:

I hope things take a better turn for you and your family in the future. Glad to hear more from you again.

Happy Solar2Day everyone!

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Kudos to Vlad and the whole Solar team. Amazing work the last couple years to keep this great engine not just alive, but growing. Hope your next year is better Vlad, we’re all hear to support you!

And the gamejam is a wonderful idea, we need to focus on growing the user base of this engine. RosiMosi will gladly help sponsor anything like this.

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Thank you @vlads!

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Thank you~! @vlads

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Thanks @vlads - You’re doing a great job!

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Let’s do this!

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Dear @vlads,

I just want to say thank you for developing/improving the Solar2D game engine. It takes a lot of passion and perseverance to work alone on such a complex project.

Thanks to your work, developers all around the world have a powerful tool to create amazing games and apps.

Your work is making a difference in the world, and I just wanted you to know that it is appreciated. Keep up the fantastic work, and thank you for everything you’ve done for the Solar2D community!

Thanks @vlads! Just started on my Solar2D journey thanks to some old Corona projects at my company, and I’m excited to try out some personal projects as well. Keep it up!

Keep up the great work, @vlads !!! :grinning:

Thanks Vlad and all in the community

Thank you @vlads and all people supporting the project and the community in every way possible! :+1: :partying_face:

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thanks @vlads .