New Year, New Me!

Hello World!

Welcome to Ape Tavern’s first blog post! If you don’t already know, we are a small group of hobbyist game developers working on games for the s&box engine.

We formed in late 2021 and have worked on a variety of games, many of which are no longer in working state. However, we have a few accomplishments to show for our time, and we have learned a lot about s&box and game development.

Here’s a look at what we did in the past year:

• Placed 1st in the second s&box game jam with our game Micro Mayhem.
• Re-wrote our first game, Grubs, in the updated scene system.
• Placed 5th in the first s&box game jam with GRUG.
• Moved our website to the Astro framework.

It doesn’t seem like much, but many of our members have full time jobs (or school) and families. Finding the time to work on games is hard, but we are passionate and believe in the future of s&box.

New Website!

Our old website was written in Svelte, and ended up being a bit of a mess (my fault). There were a couple of times I wanted to re-write it, but got annoyed with minor details and would leave it in a half-finished state.

After hearing about Astro, I decided to give it a try. The framework is geared for static sites, has great documentation, and is very fast. I spent a few solid days re-writing the website, and I’m very happy with the results. Admittedly, the site isn’t done as of writing this, but as we ramp up this year, we’ll update the assets and improve the overall design.

If you’re interested in the rest of the tech stack, we are using TailwindCSS for styling, the preact framework for reactive components, and deploy to Vercel when a commit is pushed to main.

2025 is Our Year!

With years of experience under our belts, and a full team ready to make games, we are excited to give 2025 our all. Grubs will be public again soon (pending some networking fixes from Facepunch), and we have another game in the works that we are excited for.

Consistency is the name of the game this year. We want to maintain three public games, and then have the bandwidth to work on other projects as we desire. As we build, we will post updates on our Discord and website.

We hope you get the chance to check out our games this year! Until then, here is a list of our 2025 goals:

• Keep Micro Mayhem available, get Grubs running again, and continue work on our next main project.
• Write at least one blog per quarter (not including this one).
• Build our community on social media and Discord, making Ape Tavern a hub for s&box developers.

Thanks for reading!