devblog / friday 210521 (Patreon)

Another operatic week at 65LABS. In a way. Somewhere in the guts of a computer, a fierce and bitter battle was fought and lost over a few lines of XML. Back-ups had not been made. Elsewhere, a re-amped modular synth ripped apart motes of dust hanging in the air, such was its singular ferocity. Kick drums gathered under the cover of darkness, their intentions unclear. What else? This else:

THIS WEEK

• We made the decisions that needed making and have begun development on Wreckage Systems V2. It turns out that these decisions mean this will be a major update, and therefore major undertaking. For a start, we will need to rebuild all the existing systems, and then update them to take advantage of the new possibilities we have opened up. There's going to be weeks if not months of this, and now that we have been able to hear the kinds of results V2 systems should be able to produce, it feels like we should focus on developing this to get it online as soon as possible, rather than adding more systems to the V1 live stream.
• This is bad luck for the presumably millions of other people in the world freely tuning into the stream, but as Patrons, since the public live stream likely won't be updated with new music in the near future we'll be making sure this back channel remains active. We'll keep posting musical excerpts, hopefully in time we will be able to give you access to experimental live streams from the test server... whatever else seems appropriate.
• For starters, please enjoy the excerpt from V2 of the Unravelling system at the top of this post. If you're familiar with the version from the current live stream, you'll hopefully get a sense of the leap we hope to make with V2. This update uses the exact same audio elements, but now we are able to do a lot more with them.
• On the subject of a 65LABS backchannel, over on our Discord server there is now a patron-only channel called, cryptically, #65labs_wreckage_backchannel. If you connect your Patreon account to your Discord account you will be able to access this channel. If Discord isn't your thing, don't worry, all the really important stuff will get posted on the Patreon too. The Discord channel will be for more spontaneous, throwaway stuff/screenshots/photos from 65HQ, etc.
• Yesterday, after being given a mad runaround from a vague delivery company, the final missing box of 65LABS merch arrived. It is all getting shipped out today. Massive apologies for anybody who has suffered because of this. We won't be using them again.
• Release #3 continues to evolve and approach its final form. Got some solid guitars down this week. More info on this as and when it's ready.
• Joe hurt his guitar finger. He might never play again.

NEXT WEEK

• V2, V2, V2, V2, V2, and V2
• Also more work on Release #3
• Definitely a blog post of some description as we missed getting one sorted this week