Update 1.29.3: Vibe Fools

OCT 1 2025

Hello all,

Today we have another October Fools event, our budget wacky event that occurs exactly six months from April Fools. This time the event is brought to you with the help of AI, which has creatively come up with some scenario and mutator combinations that I wouldn’t have ever thought of! (And several which are agonizingly terrible, like invisible headshot-only with bolt action rifles…)

VIBE-CODED OCTOBER FOOLS!

Of course, 2025 is the year of vibe coding and we are trying out AI tools to help us develop GunColony faster. We have decided to develop this year’s wacky mutators using AI tools for several reasons:

• Recent development disruptions that reduce our time available to develop updates and content in general as well as add content from staff members, meaning that it is probably better to focus on actual updates for the time being and thus use AI to save time on special events (more on that later).
• Limited-time gamemodes are a great opportunity to try out AI workflows which might save us time and let non-technical staff members create playlists more easily in the future, especially given that our long-term expectation is that most development (official & community) in the game will be AI-assisted in a few years, so we want to figure out how to build a development platform to enable this most efficiently. Note that the future development probably won’t rely on the AI to come up with ideas like it is doing here, but rather help increase the implementation speed of ideas that people already have, or in other words, let “that idea guy” be able to turn their ideas into fully realized game content more easily.
• A particular very recent AI model release that I wanted to try out.

Example screenshot of our vibe coding:

NEW WEAPON REMODELS

We had introduced some new weapon remodels to the server in early September, as promised, but we want to introduce more changes and fixes soon before writing a unified changelog for these changes. Stay tuned!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS UPDATE

Unfortunately, the last month has seen some development setbacks involving some hard drive and other hardware failures on a self-hosted development server. I spent some time fixing the development server, but decided that in the long-term it is probably better to avoid further failures in the first place for servers storing critical data, and thus decided to restore a backup on a cloud-hosted server.

This has coincidentally also come right after I spent two weeks migrating from my previous desktop to a new development laptop and eGPU setup (the purpose being that I can work on the server codebase and other projects on-the-go with only one local codebase set up). Therefore, while the broken server only set back development by around two weeks, coupled with the dev machine migration it ended up resulting in a 1-month gap in GunColony development, with half of it being unplanned.

We have restored development which is proceeding at a rapid pace, and the goal is to introduce new, reimagined mobs and bosses to the server powered by the new Place Engine mob system and the modding-compatible Place SDK in time for Halloween.