Origins
As an engineering-aligned creative, I started out playing games like Blocksworld, a sandbox building game, at a young age. Similarly on the Roblox platform, I found Plane Crazy, and played it for a very long time. I have 2400 hours on it as of today. Disillusioned with the state of the game and the lack of updates, I decided to move on from Plane Crazy.
Finding Plane Engineers
I got bored one day and decided to look on the Roblox discover page. I found a game called Plane Engineers, decided to try it and I found the flight and impact destruction physics to be very fun. Furthermore, I discovered that the game had a logic system that allowed for control systems, and that is when I fell in love with the game.
Initial Involvement
As a committed player with a lot of sandbox experience and a lot of feedback, I was very vocal in the community and garnered a reputation, soon becoming a tester. I quickly befriended the developers, Maks_gaming, i3ym, and samlovebutter. By request, created a plane tutorial which was then adopted into the game.
DMCA Takedowns
Maks, originally the developer of Build A Plane To Crash (BAPTC), used public Toolbox assets from Roblox Studio in order to create BAPTC, including using Rickje's assets which were accidentally published to Toolbox. Rickje139, the developer of Plane Crazy, got Plane Engineers taken down through a DMCA claim. He claimed that Plane Engineers infringed on his copyright because of 'stolen assets' from Plane Crazy. Plane Engineers was the successor to BAPTC, but shares no framework with BAPTC, the games were not even written in the same language, with BAPTC being in Lua, and Plane Engineers being in Typescript respectively.
Players complained about the down time, which was a full 14 days to dispute each claim. At first, the developers opened Test Engineers to the public, but shortly after, Test Engineers was taken down with a DMCA claim. After several takedowns, the developers started reuploading the game from different accounts since their original accounts were banned because of the claims.
Learning How to Contribute
The developers made the decision to make the game Open Sourced,
allowing players to contribute.
Previously,
I never worked on anything other than my own personal projects in Roblox Studio written in Lua.
In contrast, Overengineered was written in Typescript and managed via Github.
Working on Overengineered was what taught me how to use Github and create pull requests.
i3ym specifically, provided me with a lot of guidance through many of the issues with my
first PR.
Now What?
As the decision was made to give up on the Roblox platform, the game repository was archived and no longer uploaded to the platform. I have stopped my contributions, and the developers are currently working on an off-platform sequel, free from Rickje139's abuse of the Roblox DMCA system'. As of now, the details of the new game are unknown and the basic framework of the game is being laid out, but it is not even guaranteed that they will finish the sequel.