Open Source from Day One — and the Day It Paid Off

Blocks Beyond The Stars is completely open source — client, server, tools, all public on GitHub. Why put yourself through that, as a family project? And what does it actually get you? An interim assessment.

The invitation is built in. We didn't just want a public repository, we wanted a genuine invitation: in the game itself there's a "Join in" button with an overlay that explains how to contribute. Plus a CONTRIBUTING guide, good first issues, and an automated contributor agreement so everything is legally clean. The hurdle from player to co-builder should be as low as possible.

The day it paid off. For months, not much happened. And then came Cora de la Mouche (@corarona) — our first external contributor — and brought along something that was way down our list: a native Linux build. No Proton, no Wine — a real AppImage and a portable Linux package, part of every release since. We would have built that ourselves eventually, probably worse and certainly later. Exactly this experience was the reason for opening up the project: somebody out there can do something better than you — and open source is the invitation to show it.

What else open source forces (in a good way): Public code is tidy code. Secrets live cleanly in configuration instead of the repository, the docs have to be correct because strangers read them, and decisions are justified traceably in issues and PRs. The project became better through being public before the first stranger contributed a single line.

Honest assessment: open source is not a free dev team. It's slow relationship building — with occasional moments that justify everything. Corarona was one of those.