Hello all,
As the owner and developer of GunColony, I would like to take the opportunity of the 8th anniversary of GunColony to make an important and exciting annoucement on the future of the server for its ninth year and beyond. I hope that what I reveal today should be great news to you and all players of GunColony.
I have additionally added a section to address the recent situation of Mojang’s ban of commercial gun servers, and how this will affect GunColony going forward. (Spoiler alert: GunColony is not going anywhere, no matter what happens.)
THE STANDALONE GAME
Today, I am announcing our plans to develop a standalone game based on GunColony.
The game has yet to be named, but we are internally and temporarily naming it “GunColony 2”. Work on this game started a year ago in June 2022, and our plan is to complete and release it over the next three years while simultaneously using our new work to improve the existing GunColony server. Our aim with the standalone game is five-fold:
- Reduced dependence on Mojang and its recent decisions such as forced migration and chat reporting
- Free-to-play access from the browser and PC, and eventually mobile
- Cross-play between standalone and vanilla Minecraft players and supporting both on the same codebase
- A greatly improved game experience exploring the full possibilities of a fusion between the FPS and voxel sandbox genres, with never-seen-before game features for both FPS and Minecraft players
- Massively increased performance and reduced server hosting hosts to feasibly operate at larger scales with a player-friendly donation model
CUSTOM GAME ENGINE
For GunColony 2, we aim to build an ambitious custom voxel game engine that is cross-play compatible with Minecraft players. This is important because it will allow us to eventually move the GunColony Minecraft server to the standalone engine as well.
The game engine will have two modes. First, it can operate independently and support players who login through standalone clients, with no code in this mode being related to Mojang. Second, it can also operate alongside a module that sits on top of a Minecraft server. In this mode, standalone players still play in game worlds fully based on our own custom code, but Minecraft players can now also join and play together with standalone players, through a mixture of our own code and Minecraft code. It is this second mode on the new engine that the existing GunColony server will eventually be moved to.
DEVELOPMENT PLAN
Our current starting point is a well-documented basic engine framework with about 20,000 lines of code. Further development will happen in stages and we will start by improving the current GunColony server. We will first transition the GunColony server part by part to the new engine, starting with easier systems such as assets and player data/accounts, to harder systems such as guns and gamemodes, and finally to the entire rest of the server. We hope to finish the full conversion by releasing a 2.0 Update before GunColony’s 10th anniversary in 2025, kickstarting the era of GunColony 2.
Throughout this process we will be rewriting over 100,000 lines of code in the GunColony codebase to make the server better, but also laying out the building blocks for the standalone game simultaneously. After the 2.0 Update, we will have achieved a full standalone game server implementation supporting most or all current GunColony features as well as many new ones, and players can still play normally from Minecraft like they do now.
After the full transition of the Minecraft server to the GunColony 2 engine, we will then begin developing a fully standalone game client in earnest, and release the standalone game sometime around 2026. From then on, the two experiences will share the exact same server codebase, making it easy for us to update both at once going forwards.
Due to the incremental nature of new development, you will be able to keep all of your progress during the transition from GunColony 1 to 2. This includes your guns, attachments, level, inventory, and the tens of thousands of kills that top players have racked up in their stats (Valvo plz nerf).
NEW IMPROVEMENTS
With the standalone game, we are planning on many new improvements that will make GunColony 2 a greatly improved project compared to its predecessor in many ways.
First, I shall highlight the free-to-play nature of the standalone game, which I think would be easy to overlook. GunColony 1 was free-to-play too in some respects, as we earned no money whatsoever from players logging into the server, but in fact it was free only to players who already owned the Java edition of Minecraft. The standalone game will instead allow anyone to play the full GunColony experience for free. We aim to build a game which anyone can jump into and have fun without spending a single dime and without being marketed with pay-to-win items or obnoxious cosmetics every step of the way.
The second ingredient to make this all possible is the higher server performance. Everyone knows that hosting Minecraft servers is expensive, but the standalone game is an opportunity for us change that. Every bit of the new GunColony 2 codebase is being written from scratch with lessons learned from our 8 years of hosting Minecraft servers to ensure that it runs as quickly as possible. We are targeting a 10x speedup compared to Minecraft servers, leading to much lower server costs to truly offer a game where monetization does not get in the way of the player experience. Community servers are being considered too to further this cause.
If we do include real-money cosmetic items in our game, we plan to mostly forgo official items and instead let our community to design and sell them and benefit from a very large portion of the revenue (~75%). This is where our next innovation comes in: the browser platform. From the very first day of our idea to build a standalone game for GunColony, one requirement has been clear: that it has to run on the browser. Part of this is to simply attract more players more easily as you can play with a single hyperlink. But more importantly, the browser is the only easily-accessible game destribution platform with zero platform fees. If we had chosen Steam or most other platforms instead, we would have had to given 30% or more of our players’ money to the platform, but supporting the browser platform will allow us to give back to individual community creators much more effectively than we otherwise could.
(If you combine the last two paragraphs, you might even piece together something else we are thinking of doing.)
The final category of improvements worth mentioning is the gameplay. The original article contained a lot more details about the new gameplay potential of the standalone game, but they have had to be cut to make room for the new addendum. Here are some particularly interesting examples: deathcams/killcams and remote-controlled drones will likely be coming to both the standalone game and the Minecraft server over the next few years thanks to innovations made in the new game engine. Oh, and the servers will be natively 120 Hz and fully multithreaded, and is technically absolutely bonkers. GunColony already has great gameplay with a lot of variety and room for strategy and skill, but the standalone game will allow us to take it a lot further still to develop the dream FPS experience that we had always wanted to exist.
CONCLUSION
Under our current and detailed plans, the standalone game will offer a quantum leap in the accessibility, performance, and gameplay potential of GunColony, without existing players losing any progress nor the familiar experience of playing on a frequently-updated Minecraft server. We hope that our technical infrastructure being built now will last years if not decades, fueling steady long-term growth and powering future expansion beyond our current gameplay. We hope to explore every aspect of the intersection between the sandbox and FPS genres and more to bring a truly unique, free, transparent, and community-centric game to everyone.
ADDENDUM: AN ADDRESS TO THE RECENT MOJANG DECISION TO BAN COMMERCIAL GUN SERVERS
I will keep this short. Mojang has recently threatened to shut down a Minecraft gun server with ten years of history, Grand Theft Minecart, and clearly mentioned in their email that under a recent directive they now consider real-life-inspired firearms to breach Mojang’s guidelines for commercial servers. All gun servers to currently exist are under Mojang’s crosshairs, including GunColony.
If Mojang goes after GunColony, our two choices are to remove all realistic weapons from the server and possibly rename the server itself, or remove all sources of server revenue, up to and including donations that give nothing in return.
I will pick the latter.
If we receive an enforcement notice from Mojang, we will immediately remove our donation store which is our only source of revenue, and you will not be able to support the GunColony server at all, at least for a while. That’s OK. Mojang’s recent decision is deeply unfortunate and unreasonable. But what is fortunate to me is that the event has come at an incredibly lucky time in my life.
I founded GunColony when I was fourteen. Starting from its founding on May 31st, 2015, and for every day since, I had needed your support to keep the server afloat. Over time, GunColony grew, and I grew along with the community. However, starting this summer, I will finally be able to financially support the server on my own, and pay the server’s total hosting costs of roughly 120 dollars a month out of pocket.
In exchange for losing all of our revenue from players and carrying the costs myself, we will get to keep our server’s gameplay that me and the community has spent hard work developing over the last 8 years.
I founded GunColony when I was fourteen, to make fourteen year old me’s dream game. Today, I think I would have made fourteen-year-old me proud. But one thing’s clear: it was certainly, definitely never meant to be a game for only eighteen-year-olds and up. It was also never a game meant for an eight- or ten-year-old. Therefore, I have made my decision today to ensure that GunColony’s identity is kept intact for the years to come. I also think that it is the right thing to do for all of our staff and community members who have made custom maps and content over the years, to see them continue to be played as they were meant to be played.
Should we be forced to remove our donation store and you still wish to support GunColony, just know that the avenue to do so will not be gone forever. I was lucky to have the foresight that the Minecraft Java server space was a sinking ship and to have begun the development of a standalone game last year, following the footsteps of others like Hypixel who saw the same thing*. As soon as the standalone game releases, you will be able to support GunColony again. Maybe I will even do a pre-launch Kickstarter for the game, who knows.
I thank you for playing on and supporting my server for the last eight years and it really means a lot to me. Here’s to another eight or many more years to come.
* but not too far.
Edit on June 2nd:
Corrected the 10th Anniversary date of GunColony to 2025 and the standalone release date to 2026. The previous version of this blog post incorrectly used 2024 and 2025 respectively, but did correctly mention that the full release would be over the “next three years”.