What happens when a game developer disappears?

[Jonhinch]

I hope this question is not too stupid but what happens on BGA if a game developer leaves or just stops developing a game. Does someone else step in or do the bugs just get left forever? I ask because Space Base seems to be lacking anyone working in it which is a shame and also a waste of time for people leaving reports. I love the game and bought a copy of the game after playing it here so it is frustrating when bits don't work as they should. I am not complaining just curious as to how BGA works. I am very grateful to everyone here and have bought so many games after playing them here first. This is a fantastic site.

[Shobu]

We had a good example recently with Kulami. It was a apparently a student project, was almost working (the advanced scoring was buggy) but was abandonned. 2 years later someone else took over the code and implemented the last fixes.

[Tisaac]

Most projects are done by volonteer so if a dev quit, then nothing happens unless someone else take the project.

[robinzig]

Most projects are done by volonteer so if a dev quit, then nothing happens unless someone else take the project.

Which is wrong in my opinion. In professional software development, there is no sense of any single developer "owning" code - if the business/product needs some code changing, anyone can and will do it. (And the code is hopefully written to a standard where anyone coming in can figure out what it is doing and therefore what to change.)

There's no reason why BGA shouldn't be this way too, especially as all game adaptations use a common framework. I can understand suggestions for UX improvements not being implemented if the original developer is no longer about, but any important bugs which make an aspect of the game work incorrectly, should imo be made a priority by the BGA team to fix. Otherwise we get the situation complained about in the OP - games with serious bugs that literally never get addressed because the original volunteer developer, quite reasonably, has moved on to other things.

[Tisaac]

. (And the code is hopefully written to a standard where anyone coming in can figure out what it is doing and therefore what to change.).

That's not true in general because the framework is really low level and there are just too much freedom given to dev, making each project an whole independent world.
I dont think it should be a priority but rather bga should have a stricter quality control before releasing the games

[RobertBr]

Which is wrong in my opinion. In professional software development ...

Irrelevant because the games are *volunteer* projects. The site is a professional software development but it is just a platform on which volunteers produce content. You may not like that business model but it is hardly unusual and has proved very successful for BGA, they have no reason to change it.