vlab development has been put on hold

posted: september 2026

ok so. hello to everyone who actually uses vlab, and hello to whoever is reading this for the first time and has no clue what vlab even is yet. you read the banner right. im putting vlab on hold. and yeah it might end up being permanent, i honestly dont know yet.

some of you have probably noticed theres been no update in like a month now. i wasnt gonna just let it sit there quiet forever without saying anything, that felt kind of unfair to everyone whos actually used this thing, so heres the actual explanation instead of just vanishing.

part of it is just laziness honestly, ill admit that straight up. but thats not really the main thing. the main thing is i kind of lost the drive to keep working on it the way i used to. ive been putting most of my free time into messing around with game stuff instead lately, and every time i opened up the vlab project it started feeling like a chore instead of something i actually wanted to do. and when it gets like that nothing good comes out of forcing it anyway.

also, not gonna lie, the code is just a pain to work with at this point. it started as this tiny little python thing forever ago and over time i just kept bolting stuff onto it, the fx chain, soundboard, tts, midi, theming, the mod sdk, all of it, and now touching anything means way more testing than it used to and way more chances of breaking something else in the process. so even small changes started feeling like a whole thing.

and then theres the roadblock. the one i was kind of dreading honestly. i dont know what else to add anymore. ive sat there and thought about it more than once and just come up blank. i still use vlab myself basically every day, but when i look at it i just dont see some obvious next feature calling out to be built. and i dont wanna add stuff just for the sake of adding stuff, thats usually how you end up making something worse instead of better.

so what does this actually mean for people using it. if somethings genuinely broken ill still go fix it, thats not changing. what im not doing is sitting down and building new features or chasing new ideas for a while. and this isnt me discontinuing the project either, even if it does end up fully dying someday ill keep archives of it up forever so nobody loses access to anything. nothing is getting taken down.

realistically dont expect anything new until maybe december. and even thats more of a guess than an actual promise, so dont hold me to it too hard.

one more thing, vlab never made money and thats genuinely not the issue here, i never built it to make money to begin with. but i guess not having that kind of pull back toward it does make it easier to drift away from when my motivation dips, which is probably part of why it ended up here.

anyway. i know this isnt the update anyone wanted. i still care about vlab a lot and everything people have built around it, the mods, the themes, all of that stuff, and i appreciate everyone whos used it, reported bugs, suggested things, or just hung around in the discord. for now just enjoy it as it is i guess.

vlab turns one

posted: october 2026

kind of a weird one to post right after the whole development on hold thing, but today actually marks one year since vlab first went out, so i didnt wanna let it pass without saying something.

a years a long time for something that started as a little python script i was messing around with. its gone through a full rewrite, picked up a mod sdk, a theme system, a whole shop page full of community stuff, and a lot more along the way, and none of that happens without people actually using it and sticking around.

doesnt change anything about the hold, still dont have anything new planned right now, but i wanted todays post to be a good one instead of just more bad news. theres a little birthday thing on the main page if you wanna leave a message, it plays a dumb little horn sound when you send it, figured thats more fitting than just a wall of text.

thanks for a good first year.