This story is a lot less formal and clear cut than my other entries but is still informative and shows source code
Backstory
Hypha is a project I'll never forget, a love letter to a community of loving and friendly people alike, a love letter to A Township Tale
I'm not sure any description I give can do this game justice, it was and still is a wonderful game that I wish still saw updates, everything I write feels underwhelming but I'm sure someone out there has created a great description
Basically what happened is, the creators of A Township Tale, Alta, had kept the community in the dark regarding communication and updates for about 2 years
Not too long after that, Alta promptly fired their Community Manager, causing the community to retaliate both due to the show of complete disrespect and the severing the only form of communication the community had to Alta
After that, another Community Manager was put in place, he went on to explain that A Township Tale wasn't profitable enough to pursue, and for the forseeable future would remain up but not receive updates, a stark contrast to what we knew
Out of both anger and sadness, I, within the same week, started Hypha, a solution to the problem
What was Hypha?
Hypha was a self-hosting solution for A Township Tale, it essentially backported all the multiplayer code from an old version to the latest version, which would allow users to host their own servers on their own hardware, in the latest version, in theory allowing us to detach from Alta and make the game our own
Why Hypha?
Hypha was a solution to our limitations. For reference, if you wanted to have a server in A Township Tale, you had to pay for a monthly subscription at least once (pay once, keep it forever), and this would allow you to essentially "manage" a server and customize it to your liking within the rules Alta set in place, this for good reason meant that you couldn't run custom code on your server, so custom content was incredibly limted
Hypha however, as mentioned before, let you self-host, YOU ran the server, and YOU got to determine everything
It was called Hypha because it represented the chain reaction of what I wanted to happen, Hypha was the first individual thread in the mycelium, Hypha would then lead to more Hyphae being created and intertwining, it was my stupid way of showing how Hypha was the start of new interconnecting branches of ideas and stuff that the Hypha community were to create and maintain, I'm not even sure if it's anatomically correct
What was the goal?
Hypha was my means of detaching the game from Alta and bringing a brighter future to the game, there were talented individuals in the community with none of the tools they needed
Due to Hypha, people could use plugin loaders like BepInEx or MelonLoader to inject custom code into the server they self-hosted, allowing for custom logic and content via Unity's AssetBundles
What happened?
Just when it all started to go well, we had our first test, multiple people in one self-hosted server with almost fully functional gameplay!
We had around 50 people involved in the project at this time, that being testers, people interested in following the story, people looking to learn how to create content, and people interested in contributing overall, it seems like a tiny amount, but it's crazy to think in real life that's like 2 and a half classrooms of people all interested in your project
Anyways this was around the time we started advertising to expand the community, out of those 50 members I would say a solid 70% of them were very big voices in the community
Unfortunately this resulted in Alta noticing and demanding I cease development. Just like that, months of community effort went down the drain. Nothing else to it, just went like that :/
Here's the source code on GitHub, it's not my proudest work, it needed cleaning up, but it shows my skills off a bit (please excuse the commit messages)
It was also before I had good collaboration skills, stuff like dependencies and such were still relative to my setup of the project lol