The History of The Airline Project
The project first saw the light in 2006 as a coding exercise. For this exercise, Christian wanted to create a game and it was either going to be an airport or airline tycoon. Eventually he settled for the latter and development began. The features in this first version were limited. Essentially, you could choose from a few airlines, and fly a couple of airliners between a limited amount of airports. After a year the exercise came to an end and so did the development. Christian moved on to developing other games like a soccer manager and a platformer.
It was not until 2010 that he started to fancy continuing development on the project. Christian started sharing his game online and The Airline Project was born. A small community started taking shape and people started contributing to the game. The game vastly grew in size thanks to its open source nature and the many contributions.
In 2016 it was time to step up the game. A Kickstarter was launched to be able to host a website and to improve the advertising. Later that year, it was decided to start working on a second version. The code had become slow and some bugs were deemed unfixable. Shortly after the launch of TAPv2 the Devteam expanded, which allowed for larger updates with each release.
Finally, at the beginning of 2018 we hit our first alpha release. This sparked some interest which let the community grow further and the amount of contributions increased, ensuring the future of The Airline Project.
The Devteam and contributors
The Airline Project is being worked on by a small dedicated team of three developers from all over the Europe. The team is very open and will gladly listen to ideas and improvements.
Lead Developer:
Christian: He takes care of all the coding and bug reports. He also accounts for advertising and feature design.
Developers:
Simon: makes sure all new features are implemented in a coherent way. Advertising, data gathering, feature design and making sure history is represented in a correct way are part of his reponsibilities as well.
Stefan: he is our lead tester, he makes sure most bugs are fixed before we have a release. Next to testing he also lends a hand in feature design, detailed history checking and a good chunk of the data gathering.
Next to our devteam we also have a very engaged community. A shout out to everyone who has contributed in one way or another. They helped us numerous times with making decisions, finding bugs, gathering data or new ideas.
Kickstarter Backers and Supporters on Itch.io
The game is free to play, but some support is always appreciated.
Back in 2016 we ran a small Kickstarter to make sure the game could continue to grow. The Kickstarter succeeded and we would like to thank everyone that participated.
We would like to thank people that support us on Itch.io as well. The continued support allows us to purchase data and developer licenses.
