The Unknown Worlds Website heralds the open source release of the toolkit used to build Natural Selection 2, their action/strategy sequel. The game is written in Lua, and to assist in developing the game they created their own IDE for Lua, including a debugger, which they have previously license to other project, but are now giving away as a gift to the community. Here's word:

Although it was initially an internal tool, we quickly realized that other developers would benefit from Decoda as well. To help fund our company, we productized Decoda and began selling through our website. Over the years we’ve licensed Decoda to many game studios and its revenue helped keep our company on stable ground even in some of the rockiest financial times.

Today, after the successful launch of Natural Selection 2, we have the opportunity to re-evaluate our business strategy. As a tool, Decoda is just as important for us as it was when we wrote the first line of code — our programmers use it every day in the continuing development of the game. In fact, it’s so important to us that we want it to improve faster than ever.

We intend to keep on developing Decoda, but we are most excited about what *you* can do to help make it the best IDE out there!