Goonhub
01-05-2026, 02:18 AM
Happy one year anniversary for Round 1 of 35 Below!
If you aren't familiar, 35 Below was a Goonstation-flavoured fork I hosted and helped to develop alongside other Goonstation community members. It was used to hold a limited-time RP event round campaign in early 2025. You can read more about it here!
I've been trying to put my thoughts to paper on a retrospective look at the development process and its legacy for a while, but I know if I don't decree it finished and release it now, it never will be. What may have seemed to have been a collection of RP rounds for those playing has, to me, been defined by an intensely personal journey for me; with achievement and creative fulfillment on one side, and persistent challenges during development and my life on the other.
All thoughts and opinions expressed herein are my own and do not represent the positions of the 35 Below development team as a whole. I would definitely love to see what my fellow contributors and the players think!
In memoriam, Vic Tyler (1964-2023)
35 Below has meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Here's the story of 35 Below as I'll tell it from my point of view.
March 2021. Somewhere around that time, anyway. There's a mapping project in the works within the Goonstation community. Tselabok is an abandoned Soviet base on a terrestrial planet orbiting the red dwarf star Fugg (or Fugere, nowadays), lying on the half of the planet which remains bathed in an endless winter night. While the exact specifics of what Tselabok was (or is, if its continued development is still occurring on another Goonstation fork) don't particularly matter in this story, what did matter was that I was, at one point, one of its developers. I scratched together a few department layouts and the project, at least in its Goonstation incarnation, went dormant as its principle developers either became inactive or moved elsewhere. From then on, I'd tinker with the concept of a terrestrial station map in a winter environment, as evidenced by this forum post on January 11th 2023.
May 2023. It's been about a month since I'd officially been in remission for my cancer. Throughout the period I'd been receiving chemotherapy, I still actively participated in Goonstation; helping to organise the chess tournament event and working on a few pull requests. It's the sorta thing that happens when you have too much time on your hands. The concept continued to evolve from the spit-balled ideas on that thread as I let it rattle around in my head; abundance of spare time, after all. On a Tuesday morning, I gathered some Goonstation community members whose contributions I'd known in a group chat to help me workshop an event round series. I participated in Loafstation during the Advent and Introspector arcs and became fascinated with the idea of running a campaign with an overarching narrative. Loafstation emphasised, I think, the round-to-round character drama and worldbuilding by Stonepillar and his cohorts. It was compelling to watch and play through, but I wanted something very different. I wanted more unique mechanics for players to engage with as well as a longer leash so that the players' impact on the narrative's progression was more easily felt by them.
The team grew from an initial core group. Stonepillar was drafted for his prior experience working on Loafstation. Mr. Moriarty and Bartimeus had worked on a Bandit event as Goon mentors. Ikea and Kubius were also prominent Goon contributors. CatzTheTripled lent her writing talents. A good few others occasionally lent their expertise in writing, art, and in helping to review code and playtest. I cannot thank everyone enough.
The renamed 35 Below campaign was to be a secret from the rest of the Goonstation community as I worried that we'd have outside pressures mounting on us to finish up. Just as well, as the original launch date was slated for August 2023. How unbelievable such a timeline would've been with the benefit of hindsight but our ambitions scaled beyond feasibly completing it on time. Work came in bursts. 35 Below occupied my mind on afternoon walks. It stole from the other pursuits of life for a young adult. At the time, with undiagnosed and unmanaged ADHD, 35 Below was impossible to balance alongside slipping academic grades and maintaining my own health. Pro-tip, do not restart full-time university education 3 months after finishing high-dose chemotherapy; you don't have the same normal you did before surviving cancer became your full-time job.
A new year came and we were months overdue our most optimistic projections. If the project manager couldn't focus all his energy on seeing 35 Below to completion, it certainly did not fall on the gracious donations of time and talent given by the other volunteers. Features were completed piecemeal then subsequently made obsolete by the upstream codebase. Our tooling broke and merge conflicts had to be resolved near constantly even with our best efforts to modularise the codebase. By its very nature, our quality standards were not as stringent as Goonstation's -- let alone an enterprise codebase -- as it took precious time to review and amend. While we were concurrently working on Goonstation contributions at the same time, this was the last thing I wanted to be doing.
The pace picked up closer to the end of 2024. More people onboarded with the team; Retrino, MylieDaniels, Roxy, Glowbold. Production meetings (Just like an enterprise software company! Ew!) tracked closer to finalising our most ambitious ventures. I knew that, having paused university for 2024, I wanted to get 35 Below out the door before I had to go back in 2025. A final date was pinned for the first round of the four; January 5 2025. We kept running tests, kept exercising our server deployment stack to ensure it was in good order, and planned to invite a group of Goonstation administrators to playtest in the weeks before the official announcement in January. While I had access to my own Goonstation-adjacent communities to advertise the project to prospective players, the crown jewel was some semi-official endorsement or announcement on a Goonstation channel; boy did that work out great for us!
By launch, the planetary map had cycled through three completely different iterations, entire systems were built from the ground up to bring our vision of a planetary colony to life, and tools were created out of whole cloth to deploy the server, facilitate moderation, and generate the terrain that would ultimately become the exoplanetary surface we know and love. 35 Below became something beyond my wildest imagination, beyond a threshold where I thought my skillset would limit my ability to create an experience I would be happy with.
The better part of two years in which core development took place felt like an age compared to the two-ish months 35 Below was live. People who were genuinely interested in a creative project I had a hand in poured into the temporary Discord server within minutes. I don't even know if I can describe what it felt like to see everyone's suspense lifted on that first round. Nothing like this had really happened with Goonstation before; Loafstation and Incursion -- a previous event round of mine with some custom assets and high level narrative direction -- were themselves impressive but their scope wasn't anywhere near as expansive.
Our work had only really begun once we published. Feverishly working between event rounds to the last minute. Losing sleep as I stayed up to the 10:00 start time so as to avoid sleeping through it and disappointing enough people for my conscience to never allow it. Facilitating special role surveys, preparing players for new antagonist types with new mechanics, hand-editing the maps that had been saved from the previous round, and adding even more mechanics as ideas flowed in from a vibrant, impassioned community. It was a lucky break when TemThrush and Azwald provided the utterly gorgeous title screen art -- TemThrush doing so on her own and graciously allowing us to use it -- for my lobby splash art sat dormant for a year. As of writing, it remains unfinished. In spite of our difficulties, we kept at it. It was the most fun I had with Goonstation in a long time even if I never got to play.
It's certainly easy for me to look back with the benefit of hindsight at all the areas we could've improved with 35 Below. There was no shortage of rough patches with our codebase as we wrangled it into being Alright On The Night; hours overdue. Anyone who remembers the 8 GB of saline fiasco, snowmobile-based clown duplication, and server crashes initiated by Karkhovchanka's gunner's seat would know. Delaying the final round by a week, while it provided a great opportunity to add finishing touches and fix game-breaking issues, ate at me as I began my ill-fated third attempt for my undergraduate program. And even in spite of our best efforts, the greatest irony was in 35 Below meeting its end in the same manner as it had before through a bug we'd thought we'd fixed. Seeing that deathmatch cut short from a recursive faction announcement hurt badly, but the project faced down death in the way it wanted to go out; kicking, screaming, and flipping the bird with both hands as it should.
And so, 35 Below wrapped up with a midnight livestream in March 2025, where the Discord server's deletion was broadcast to everyone who was still left to play a 35 Below-themed skribbl.io game. A year-ish on from its launch, I've had a funny relationship with the project I'd spent so much of myself on.
For starters, it is not a good idea to host your own public Space Station 13 server. Moderation, maintenance, and deployment are individually enormous endeavours already, and our small team would never have been able to keep it up long term. The costs to operate the private GitHub organisation, the virtual server instance (including scaling single-thread performance for our massive influx of traffic), and the other associated expenses readily bled out of my own pocket. Granted, I may have unintentionally overspent in some respects. Thank you to those who graciously donated for helping to offset the costs of 35 Below!
35 Below, like Loafstation and Incursion before it, was always intended to be a temporary fixture. The experience relied heavily on maintaining our divergences from upstream Gooncode and human labour that presented an opportunity cost from not being able to work on cool things for upstream or other personal projects. Philosophically, I valued the impermanence of the experience. It was only ever gonna happen once, and it'll be treasured and talked about all the more for that. It lives on in archived materials and the stories we share, yes, but the novelty of scratching together a colony from nothing and seeing through its trials and tribulations was worth it for those who got to attend and would've worn off eventually if it stretched for too long.
There's a first time for everything, and 35 Below was the first time I'd really taken on a project of this scope while co-ordinating with so many others. I have a penchant for being hard on myself, but I still think about my performance often. While I tried to keep my creative overrides to a minimum and preferred to work harmoniously with my cohorts, creative disagreements and some poorly exercised judgement on my part have certainly left sore impressions among those who I truly respect. I think I would enjoy a role without so much riding on my shoulders for next time!
35 Below happened in a very dynamic time in my life as a young adult living in the shadow of a Significant Emotional Event and its ongoing consequences; let alone the standard fare intrinsic to this life stage. I wrestled with my own mortality, afraid that I wouldn't see my work to completion. Online and offline, I've hurt, been hurt, loved, and lost. I've said and done things I wish I could take back within the spaces I called home; where I've broken others' trust and confidence in my judgement. I want to be the person that elects for the hard path of working to grow, to engage in healthy introspection, and to claw back trust from those who I have not completely spurned. Life, of course, remains a bumpy road pockmarked with what-ifs; murkiness that has often driven me to some dark places. I can only promise to you that I'm trying.
Working on 35 Below through some of the loneliest chapters of my life provided an escape from the challenges of life but it also sunk a lot of myself into it; thank goodness for Vyvanse. I look back on 35 Below with rose-tinted glasses. It's the singularly greatest creative endeavour I've had the pleasure of being a part of. And that wording, "part", is the most important part to me. Being my own harshest critic, were I alone in its creation, I would not look to this adventure with such fondness. It wouldn't have been there without the hard work of the team members that volunteered so much of themselves to bring it to life. It wouldn't have been there without the numerous folks who played some part, no matter how small, in its creation.
As for any successor campaigns to 35 Below, be it sequels, reboots, or scrapping its parts for another adventure... I've flip-flopped on my position on this plenty. 35 Below 2 is not going to happen; I think I exhausted my ideas for the concept with the first incarnation. I want to keep making cool stuff and to see the folks I've come to know and cherish over my time here enjoying what I make. I don't plan to stop making things for Goonstation quite yet, and I can't fully rule out the possibility of another campaign in the future. But, if and when it does happen, I think I'll try using my mentor event privilege instead!
Thank you for reading. And thank you to everyone who took part in this adventure.
If you aren't familiar, 35 Below was a Goonstation-flavoured fork I hosted and helped to develop alongside other Goonstation community members. It was used to hold a limited-time RP event round campaign in early 2025. You can read more about it here!
I've been trying to put my thoughts to paper on a retrospective look at the development process and its legacy for a while, but I know if I don't decree it finished and release it now, it never will be. What may have seemed to have been a collection of RP rounds for those playing has, to me, been defined by an intensely personal journey for me; with achievement and creative fulfillment on one side, and persistent challenges during development and my life on the other.
All thoughts and opinions expressed herein are my own and do not represent the positions of the 35 Below development team as a whole. I would definitely love to see what my fellow contributors and the players think!
In memoriam, Vic Tyler (1964-2023)
35 Below has meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Here's the story of 35 Below as I'll tell it from my point of view.
March 2021. Somewhere around that time, anyway. There's a mapping project in the works within the Goonstation community. Tselabok is an abandoned Soviet base on a terrestrial planet orbiting the red dwarf star Fugg (or Fugere, nowadays), lying on the half of the planet which remains bathed in an endless winter night. While the exact specifics of what Tselabok was (or is, if its continued development is still occurring on another Goonstation fork) don't particularly matter in this story, what did matter was that I was, at one point, one of its developers. I scratched together a few department layouts and the project, at least in its Goonstation incarnation, went dormant as its principle developers either became inactive or moved elsewhere. From then on, I'd tinker with the concept of a terrestrial station map in a winter environment, as evidenced by this forum post on January 11th 2023.
May 2023. It's been about a month since I'd officially been in remission for my cancer. Throughout the period I'd been receiving chemotherapy, I still actively participated in Goonstation; helping to organise the chess tournament event and working on a few pull requests. It's the sorta thing that happens when you have too much time on your hands. The concept continued to evolve from the spit-balled ideas on that thread as I let it rattle around in my head; abundance of spare time, after all. On a Tuesday morning, I gathered some Goonstation community members whose contributions I'd known in a group chat to help me workshop an event round series. I participated in Loafstation during the Advent and Introspector arcs and became fascinated with the idea of running a campaign with an overarching narrative. Loafstation emphasised, I think, the round-to-round character drama and worldbuilding by Stonepillar and his cohorts. It was compelling to watch and play through, but I wanted something very different. I wanted more unique mechanics for players to engage with as well as a longer leash so that the players' impact on the narrative's progression was more easily felt by them.
The team grew from an initial core group. Stonepillar was drafted for his prior experience working on Loafstation. Mr. Moriarty and Bartimeus had worked on a Bandit event as Goon mentors. Ikea and Kubius were also prominent Goon contributors. CatzTheTripled lent her writing talents. A good few others occasionally lent their expertise in writing, art, and in helping to review code and playtest. I cannot thank everyone enough.
The renamed 35 Below campaign was to be a secret from the rest of the Goonstation community as I worried that we'd have outside pressures mounting on us to finish up. Just as well, as the original launch date was slated for August 2023. How unbelievable such a timeline would've been with the benefit of hindsight but our ambitions scaled beyond feasibly completing it on time. Work came in bursts. 35 Below occupied my mind on afternoon walks. It stole from the other pursuits of life for a young adult. At the time, with undiagnosed and unmanaged ADHD, 35 Below was impossible to balance alongside slipping academic grades and maintaining my own health. Pro-tip, do not restart full-time university education 3 months after finishing high-dose chemotherapy; you don't have the same normal you did before surviving cancer became your full-time job.
A new year came and we were months overdue our most optimistic projections. If the project manager couldn't focus all his energy on seeing 35 Below to completion, it certainly did not fall on the gracious donations of time and talent given by the other volunteers. Features were completed piecemeal then subsequently made obsolete by the upstream codebase. Our tooling broke and merge conflicts had to be resolved near constantly even with our best efforts to modularise the codebase. By its very nature, our quality standards were not as stringent as Goonstation's -- let alone an enterprise codebase -- as it took precious time to review and amend. While we were concurrently working on Goonstation contributions at the same time, this was the last thing I wanted to be doing.
The pace picked up closer to the end of 2024. More people onboarded with the team; Retrino, MylieDaniels, Roxy, Glowbold. Production meetings (Just like an enterprise software company! Ew!) tracked closer to finalising our most ambitious ventures. I knew that, having paused university for 2024, I wanted to get 35 Below out the door before I had to go back in 2025. A final date was pinned for the first round of the four; January 5 2025. We kept running tests, kept exercising our server deployment stack to ensure it was in good order, and planned to invite a group of Goonstation administrators to playtest in the weeks before the official announcement in January. While I had access to my own Goonstation-adjacent communities to advertise the project to prospective players, the crown jewel was some semi-official endorsement or announcement on a Goonstation channel; boy did that work out great for us!
By launch, the planetary map had cycled through three completely different iterations, entire systems were built from the ground up to bring our vision of a planetary colony to life, and tools were created out of whole cloth to deploy the server, facilitate moderation, and generate the terrain that would ultimately become the exoplanetary surface we know and love. 35 Below became something beyond my wildest imagination, beyond a threshold where I thought my skillset would limit my ability to create an experience I would be happy with.
The better part of two years in which core development took place felt like an age compared to the two-ish months 35 Below was live. People who were genuinely interested in a creative project I had a hand in poured into the temporary Discord server within minutes. I don't even know if I can describe what it felt like to see everyone's suspense lifted on that first round. Nothing like this had really happened with Goonstation before; Loafstation and Incursion -- a previous event round of mine with some custom assets and high level narrative direction -- were themselves impressive but their scope wasn't anywhere near as expansive.
Our work had only really begun once we published. Feverishly working between event rounds to the last minute. Losing sleep as I stayed up to the 10:00 start time so as to avoid sleeping through it and disappointing enough people for my conscience to never allow it. Facilitating special role surveys, preparing players for new antagonist types with new mechanics, hand-editing the maps that had been saved from the previous round, and adding even more mechanics as ideas flowed in from a vibrant, impassioned community. It was a lucky break when TemThrush and Azwald provided the utterly gorgeous title screen art -- TemThrush doing so on her own and graciously allowing us to use it -- for my lobby splash art sat dormant for a year. As of writing, it remains unfinished. In spite of our difficulties, we kept at it. It was the most fun I had with Goonstation in a long time even if I never got to play.
It's certainly easy for me to look back with the benefit of hindsight at all the areas we could've improved with 35 Below. There was no shortage of rough patches with our codebase as we wrangled it into being Alright On The Night; hours overdue. Anyone who remembers the 8 GB of saline fiasco, snowmobile-based clown duplication, and server crashes initiated by Karkhovchanka's gunner's seat would know. Delaying the final round by a week, while it provided a great opportunity to add finishing touches and fix game-breaking issues, ate at me as I began my ill-fated third attempt for my undergraduate program. And even in spite of our best efforts, the greatest irony was in 35 Below meeting its end in the same manner as it had before through a bug we'd thought we'd fixed. Seeing that deathmatch cut short from a recursive faction announcement hurt badly, but the project faced down death in the way it wanted to go out; kicking, screaming, and flipping the bird with both hands as it should.
And so, 35 Below wrapped up with a midnight livestream in March 2025, where the Discord server's deletion was broadcast to everyone who was still left to play a 35 Below-themed skribbl.io game. A year-ish on from its launch, I've had a funny relationship with the project I'd spent so much of myself on.
For starters, it is not a good idea to host your own public Space Station 13 server. Moderation, maintenance, and deployment are individually enormous endeavours already, and our small team would never have been able to keep it up long term. The costs to operate the private GitHub organisation, the virtual server instance (including scaling single-thread performance for our massive influx of traffic), and the other associated expenses readily bled out of my own pocket. Granted, I may have unintentionally overspent in some respects. Thank you to those who graciously donated for helping to offset the costs of 35 Below!
35 Below, like Loafstation and Incursion before it, was always intended to be a temporary fixture. The experience relied heavily on maintaining our divergences from upstream Gooncode and human labour that presented an opportunity cost from not being able to work on cool things for upstream or other personal projects. Philosophically, I valued the impermanence of the experience. It was only ever gonna happen once, and it'll be treasured and talked about all the more for that. It lives on in archived materials and the stories we share, yes, but the novelty of scratching together a colony from nothing and seeing through its trials and tribulations was worth it for those who got to attend and would've worn off eventually if it stretched for too long.
There's a first time for everything, and 35 Below was the first time I'd really taken on a project of this scope while co-ordinating with so many others. I have a penchant for being hard on myself, but I still think about my performance often. While I tried to keep my creative overrides to a minimum and preferred to work harmoniously with my cohorts, creative disagreements and some poorly exercised judgement on my part have certainly left sore impressions among those who I truly respect. I think I would enjoy a role without so much riding on my shoulders for next time!
35 Below happened in a very dynamic time in my life as a young adult living in the shadow of a Significant Emotional Event and its ongoing consequences; let alone the standard fare intrinsic to this life stage. I wrestled with my own mortality, afraid that I wouldn't see my work to completion. Online and offline, I've hurt, been hurt, loved, and lost. I've said and done things I wish I could take back within the spaces I called home; where I've broken others' trust and confidence in my judgement. I want to be the person that elects for the hard path of working to grow, to engage in healthy introspection, and to claw back trust from those who I have not completely spurned. Life, of course, remains a bumpy road pockmarked with what-ifs; murkiness that has often driven me to some dark places. I can only promise to you that I'm trying.
Working on 35 Below through some of the loneliest chapters of my life provided an escape from the challenges of life but it also sunk a lot of myself into it; thank goodness for Vyvanse. I look back on 35 Below with rose-tinted glasses. It's the singularly greatest creative endeavour I've had the pleasure of being a part of. And that wording, "part", is the most important part to me. Being my own harshest critic, were I alone in its creation, I would not look to this adventure with such fondness. It wouldn't have been there without the hard work of the team members that volunteered so much of themselves to bring it to life. It wouldn't have been there without the numerous folks who played some part, no matter how small, in its creation.
As for any successor campaigns to 35 Below, be it sequels, reboots, or scrapping its parts for another adventure... I've flip-flopped on my position on this plenty. 35 Below 2 is not going to happen; I think I exhausted my ideas for the concept with the first incarnation. I want to keep making cool stuff and to see the folks I've come to know and cherish over my time here enjoying what I make. I don't plan to stop making things for Goonstation quite yet, and I can't fully rule out the possibility of another campaign in the future. But, if and when it does happen, I think I'll try using my mentor event privilege instead!
Thank you for reading. And thank you to everyone who took part in this adventure.
