Greetings Captains and Crews of the Skies!

Seeing so many people across the years respond to our post, jumping back into the comments and the Guns Discord, with many little stories and moments shared, we felt really moved and nostalgic, so we wanted to gather some of these stories together for everyone. If you have a fond memory, a funny story, or met a group of people that have been a part of your life while playing our games, we would love to hear them! Drop them in the comments here or post them in the General chat in the Guns Discord. We'll collect them all and share them with everyone.

Let me share mine first, one about how we started:

Releasing a game that weve worked on for over 2 years should be a cause for joy and celebration. For us, it turned out to be the biggest crisis weve ever faced. Leading up to release, positive and supportive articles, previews, and videos by journalists and casters gave the game some momentum. Our Kickstarter backers and alpha/beta players were also incredible at helping us test, fix issues, and get the word out. Later in beta (when people could pre-order) and when the game went live, it reached #2 in Indie and #7 overall on Steam. I took a screenshot and savored for a brief moment. Then disaster struck, literally. Survival was once again on the line.
We had known that Hurricane Sandy was building, but we had no idea how devastating it would end up being. On the eve of the games launch, we found that out for ourselves first hand. As the game went live, most of NYC, NJ, and Connecticuts power and internet were being knocked out, and there was severe flooding and debris falling everywhere. New York was not (and still isnt) equipped to handle a hurricane, and the city was battered to a halt. There were no subway lines running, no buses or cars on the street. The wind shook buildings, and windows panes were falling away and shattering on the pavements. Cranes on buildings under construction were torn and dangling precariously. Trees fell, houses flooded and uprooted near the shores. The area around our building was flooded, and we would end up having no power and internet in our space for almost a month. A month later, after the storm had passed, I went out to the Rockaways to volunteer. For miles, there would be nothing open, no electricity, and almost no activities of daily life. At a gas station, people would line up over 10 blocks or what seemed like a mile to get gas under army surveillance. At the volunteer station, we went through huge piles of various items of necessity, and it wasnt enough. All this hit on the night we released the game.

Around release, we had a lot of players in-game, and a lot of them had very rough experiences. Servers were teetering and going down as the storm slammed our hosting companys facilities. Steams servers that we used for authentication and voice were very unstable as well. Disconnections, match slowdowns, server overloading and hangups abounded. We had slow to no access to Steams dev portal as well as our site, so had a desperate time supporting players or even updating our Steam page info. We also had player reported issues with disconnections, crashes, frame drops, etc., that were new to us. The game released, and it was at or near the top of Steams charts. Yet, we had no time to do anything else but to buckle down and get to work. I was stressed out and wanted to freak out, but players were waiting and everything that could have gone wrong was going wrong, so there was really no time for that. For the first week, because most of us had no internet or power for long stretches, we had to divide up the support roles. A couple of us who had internet were on player support, updating players on Steam forum, our forum, and in game for pretty much all our waking hours. The programmers were debugging and trying to divert traffic to server regions that were unaffected by the hurricane. One problem we had was that the build machine we were using to deploy builds was in our studio room, and the building was closed off by the NYPD, and submerged in one story of water. We had quite a few fixes that we urgently needed to commit and deploy. We mulled over our options, trying to figure out if we could deploy without the machine. If we couldn't, who should go in to retrieve it, and where could we relocate and set the machine up. One of our programmers decided to go because he knew what to get and knew the deploy code the best. He biked in, but our building was closed off. He was standing by while we haggled with the building security trying to talk our way in. Finally, he made it in, grabbed what we needed, ditched his bike (which was actually still there a day later), and rode an absolutely cramped bus to my apartment where I had power and internet working. For the rest of the day and night, he set up the build machine while I updated our status and supported players. The programmers made fixes and deployed while the rest of us then jumped on support. And while the servers were being overloaded, we were manually starting matches for people and in game helping people pretty much non-stop. We probably had one of the most harrowing, stressful, and sleepless launch weeks ever, but we stuck together and fought through it. With conditions being as rough as it was, we lost players for certain. Some people had a rough time in the game and quit the game forever. But to see how supportive a lot of the players were was also very uplifting. We got a lot of nice posts on Steam like this one below: First off I would like to congratulate you on releasing a great game; the gameplay, art, and music compliment each other incredibly well. Second off, wishing everybody is all right in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and hopefully the team is back at full force soon. And they definitely motivated us to work hard for the players and to keep the game alive. Over the next few weeks, we would roll in patch after patch. Desperate times called for desperate measures. At least the players knew we were trying everything we could. We identified many issues to fix and things to improve on over the coming weeks and months, but our initial bond with our players was forged through a hurricane. Because of the support of our players and our community, we accomplished the most important thing in the early days of the game - not dying. Thanks so much everyone! - Howard for Team Muse

[ 2025-04-22 18:52:41 CET ] [ Original post ]