Current State & Future of Xenyria

As most of you have noticed, there haven't been any updates on Xenyria for a long while now. As such, I want to give a quick update regarding the current state and the future of the project.



Over the past half-year, Xenyria has been in a state of limbo. Most of you have likely noticed that the Discord server & social accounts were taken down out of nowhere. Understandably, this left many people feeling disappointed, confused, or concerned. I want to sincerely apologize for that and provide some transparency.



The truth is that I have been going through a very difficult time in my personal life. Shortly after the first playtest, I had reached a point where I felt completely burnt out. I felt unable to continue to work on Xenyria due to the overwhelming amount of work ahead of me combined with severe financial issues & mental health problems. Unfortunately, this had a direct impact on the project for which I want to apologize.

Over the last couple of weeks, things have been slowly stabilizing in my personal life. Although I still have tons of things to work on, I feel ready to dedicate my attention to Xenyria again and restore it to its former glory. However, this is no easy task, and given our limited resources at this time, it will take some time before everything returns to normal again.

What has happened so far

- We have created a new Discord server, making it easier for players and staff to communicate, exchange ideas & feedback, and coordinate play sessions. Please note that some channels & other features are still missing at this time.

- We've brought back a temporary test server for PaintSquad 3.0 (paintsquad.xenyria.net, Java Edition 1.21.4). Please note that this server is running the playtest version from January.

- The legacy network (play.xenyria.net, Java Edition 1.20.1) is also back online, making Rush playable again. However, some features like voting are disabled for the time being.

- We have restored several other parts of our internal infrastructure, including our website and internal development tools.

We will also work towards bringing back our Soundtrack YouTube channel, support system, and many other things in the coming weeks and months.

A look into the future...

Since making the decision to continue development, I've been working through the technical debt and architectural issues within Xenyria's codebase. After the first playtest we noticed that many of our systems were poorly structured, which would have caused severe issues in the future. As a result, we've decided to make drastic changes to our codebase once again, including a complete rewrite in a different programming language. Although this situation is very similar to the refactoring phase that took a little over one year, I can assure you that this time it won't take nearly as long.

We're transitioning from Java to Kotlin, which offers a significantly better developer experience along with improved development speed. We currently estimate that the conversion will take around two to three months to complete. Although development on PaintSquad itself has been on hold during the past six months, we've used some of this time to plan important architectural changes based on the feedback and experience we've gained during the last playtest.

Once we have finished bringing our codebase into a working state again, we will proceed to add new features to PaintSquad and work through all the feedback & suggestions that were provided to us Although it will still be a little while before we can show some new content for PaintSquad, I can hereby say that the project is now under active development again. Additionally, we will be resuming monthly blog posts going forward to keep everyone informed about our progress. Please note that we're not able to provide an exact release date for PaintSquad 3.0 at this time.

And with that we've arrived at the end of this short update post. I hope I was able to provide some insight into what has happened over the last few months. Lastly, I would like to use this moment to thank everyone who has stuck around, waited patiently, or supported me or Xenyria in some other form. Thank you for your support & understanding - I look forward to giving a more positive update on development progress at the end of August.