Evolution of Minetest CTF game over years
Years ago, when I was in early highschool, I found Minetest CTF game. Back then, it was introduced by rubenwardy and it had only one map. Mainly because it was a FOSS project, and because contributions were welcome, over years people joined to help developing the game and as some contributors or developers left, some others appeared to replace them.
I started development to create a game where players made countries and castles and fought each other. It would have been similar to persistent kingdoms today. At some point I switched to making CTF instead, with temporary maps rather than persistent, to make it easier to test the code. –rubenwardy
2013, the end of the world and the birthyear of Minetest CTF
According to the forum topic, birthday of CTF should be somewhere in 2013. Rubenwardy created a modpack with which one could build team based PvP games like CTF. The Github repository is now archived as the code has been merged into the main CTF repository. Initially, the server was very small(regarding number of supported players which according to ruben was 14) and was hosted from rubenwardy’s home.
2015-2016
I joined the server to play the game sometime in 2016 I believe. The server was small, frequently laggy and was hosted by rubenwardy on DigitalOcean. There was only one map which we had to play over and over. Steel sword was the thing which was making players unkillable as the only other sword was stone sword! Shotgun was shooting a single bullet which could remove wood or stone blocks. My hobby was hiding in the trees and shooting the enemy base blocks down one by one!
Who knows the name of that one map? :)
2017-2018, multiple maps
We have multiple maps. Yes! We don’t have to play a single map over and over. And people are slowly starting to submit their own maps to the game. We also have got grenades and SMGs in game. The pro chest requirement is a few thousands of score.
Additionally, I’ve suggested adding mobs to the game and then people on Discord have made a “ADD MOBZ PLZ” emoji with as a symbol of non-sensible suggestion xD
2019-2020, classes and more maps!
By introducing classes, players can choose to heal, to shoot or to charge with sword. We have new blocks like reinforced cobble to make our base defenses. There was a bug in which when you right click on many stones, a furnace form was showed. This bug has been fixed sometime in 2019. Also a map catalog is added and more maps are being proposed.
2021-2022
I see some commits from LoneWolfHT. People were formerly complaining about their teammates stealing their kills and now we have kill assists. And in this year, CTF v3.0 gets released which mainly introduces multiple modes!
During this period, rubenwardy loses interest in developing the game and he wisely hands it over to LoneWolf/LandarVargan who later recruits another core developer, savilli.
2021 till present
During this period, one of the core developers, savilli, has left. And we are pacing slower. However, we have got some new contributors some of which are youths. On the other hand, the player base is the largest of all these years and if we count other CTF servers like JMA and others, it is even bigger.
Future?
There are many things which slowly are being added to CTF. Including but not limited to Flagwars mode where the enemy touching your flag means end of game for your team. And Domination mode where one team has to conquer land till they can reach the enemy flag and steal it. I am also looking forward to verified player bots in game.