Visions of Community Future (Patreon)

okay i've only been putting off writing this for weeks, let's go. so in previous posts, i talked about how past community releases have been awful and how this one has actually been pretty great. now i want to talk about our plans moving forward.

The biggest difference between past and present is how much I have let others help.

the keyword there is "let". there is something to be said for modern technology enabling that with git and script exports, etc, but for the sake of personal accountability i'm setting that aside. as much as i single-handedly pushed this project forward in the early years, i also strangleheld it. i was distrustful of people and even when random stranger at the time kurotsune asked to help with programming, the risk of them just signing onto the project, deleting everything and then leaving like "haha gotcha loser" felt very real to me. i had that concern with every single person who offered to chip in. this is an example of how my emotional issues negatively impacted the project as its leader, and in retrospect, it was obviously completely ridiculous.

i eventually learned from that and i feel like as a team, we now function as i imagine the "average" indie dev team should. i am super grateful just for that-- having a team is incredible. being able to make this postgame in a year is incredible. having such a supportive and involved community is well beyond incredible. and also, if we keep moving in the same direction, we can do even better. there's a way forward there.

Going forward, I want to explore how to involve the community more.

That's you guys! Also like, the entire rest of the main site and server, but especially you guys.

A look at the AAA industry shows that even when money is not really a concern, there's a lot of issues with the state of game development right now. It's rare enough to find a company that is able to create consistent quality work, and the bar for quality keeps rising along with the amount of work to maintain it. On top of that, we have case after case of employees being crunched into misery by publishers and corporations, games being forced to ship with a fraction of their promised features and more cats than the city pound, and also apparently every major studio is just a cesspool of sexual harassment. It is messy and heartbreaking and the inherent problems are hurting both developers and (i'm not gonna say the G word) people who play video games alike.

But also, everyone really likes games so we keep trying. It's not like anyone wants it to be this way-- these are just problems that no one has been able to solve yet. Personally, I feel grateful to be in a field that has so much love and passion into it despite the issues. But I don't want to become part of the status quo. For these reasons, it's important to me to explore different approaches beyond just being the average indie team.

They say it takes a village to raise a child. Well... Reborn is kind of my baby. It has some younger siblings too. So, isn't it kind of lucky that we happen to have a village right here between us already?

This testing phase has been an excellent example of how amazing everyone here has been. See the entire last post of how all three of the people I picked just to help out with legwork managed to jump the project forward in their own ways-- and then more stepped up to help beyond that. Hell, just last night I was getting kind of frustrated trying to replicate an issue with floating platforms in game breaking; it's been haunting us for weeks because I couldn't get it to happen. So I just dropped it on the patreon server and said "hey, help pls?" and by the time I woke up, a handful of you had taken a swing at it and blue had found and fixed the problem. Perfect small scale example. I think after all of this, I would be silly not to open it up and involve you all more.

In the past, I used to feel kind of bad about asking others to help. Actually, I'm still not great at it, but comparatively, I've gotten a lot better. This Patreon took a lot of courage to start, and everyone we've worked with has been amazing and happy to help. Still, I sometimes slide back into feelings of 'ah geez am i just parasocially manipulating the people around me into doing my work for me like some kind of tyrant?' and... well... you could argue it, maybe... ...but at the same time-- I mean, have you all been to the secret dev room in game yet? If not, you should find it! Vulpix will guide you.  Anyway, to give a brief spoiler about some of the stuff there, a few of the others from our team mention how working on the project has actually helped them personally. Making Reborn has been volunteer work for the team. They are putting a lot of time and energy into this, and for most of the development cycle, I was only making enough money to cover my own rent. So, I felt like I was operating on charity and debts of goodwill. I thought that any day now, half the team was going to get bored or tired or something and be like "aite imma head out gl with the rest bye." ...There's probably some more emotional issues at play there, but let's not focus on those right now... Reading about how sticking with this and doing this volunteer work actually helped them has been eye-opening. I teared up when I first read most of them. Anyway, it has me revisiting my feelings on team efforts. Instead of assuming that working on the game is a drain on others, maybe it can be a good thing for them. I mean, I always still love making games. So, maybe... duh?

If you know Rejuv, you probably know Zumi. And if you're around Zumi for a few years, you'll probably hear her talk about her annual flower festivals. My understanding of them is that ever year her home community hard-engages in a project to construct a bunch of floats out of locally grown flowers, and then they all have a big parade and vote on which ones like best. The floats are pretty hecking incredible, complete with music, prop actors and moving parts, and it seems like a really spectacular experience to have a chance to be a part of.  So, I think... ...Maybe instead of being a model of corporatized software profiting that preys on the passion of fans and developers alike... ...Maybe game development can just be a little more like that?

Hey,  We're making a cool thing.  Wanna see?  Wanna pick some flowers and help out?

Development is a journey, not a destination

One of the things I think I accidentally did very well Reborn in its early days, starting from it being the online league, was that its creation was very much an experience. Being part of this community back then meant you had visible impact on the events of the game because you were out there talking to the league leaders on a nightly basis. You were part of the crowds who had a chance to pile with fifteen other people into the sim chatbox and cheer on one side of the other in all caps. And you could make some friends and learn stuff while doing it. I think I lost that a little bit during development.

Patreon has helped bring it back a bit. You all are helping out by chipping in a few dollars, and in return you get the up close and personal of my feelings here and whatever bullshit goes on in the patron Discord server (most recently, a bunch of the others have starter over on some new Suffering ™ nuzlocke runs as a group, naming mons after each other and fully expecting to eat shit and die. but it's okay, because they're eating shit and dying as frens)

Testing has also been great for this because there's been no shortage of things for people to get involved and help out with. From herding cats, to helping troubleshoot, making guides, and most recently we're taking a community-led swing at patching up the wiki to make it more helpful and prettier (which you can help with too if you'd like! Coordination is in the #reborn-wiki-project channel on the main server!) ... there's been a lot of ways for people to interact, work together, and get some cool shit done together.

Frankly, I'm grateful even to the folks who haven't gotten involved with all that stuff, but have made their own reaction threads, or camped out in others and the game discussion channels just to help others, hang out, and make sure people feel seen. It's not hard. Anyone can do that. But it is still valuable. That's community, I think.

It's just a shame that testing will be coming to a close soon. It would be a loss to let that momentum and connection go along with it... If only there were some kind of fun, long-term project, with a ridiculous amount of work that needed to be done on it, that we could somehow continue to involve people with, forming connections and teaching skills along the way...

... So hopefully you're caught up with how I'm thinking about this stuff now. I'm really excited to experiment and find more ways to keep people involved at all levels and stages of development.

Right now, this is an ideal; not a concrete plan

I feel very strongly about all of this, but I don't actually know how this is going to look in practice. I have some ideas, of course... but the process of learning and figuring out the journey is very much going to be a journey in and of itself. I'm open to ideas.

At the very least, I hope you're here for the ideal with me. Honestly, you all are amazing for still being here at all-- a part of me was always very scared that as soon as the game was finished, this place would just become a ghost town. It's really not been the case at all, even though we are still in testing. I hope those of you who joined recently will continue to stick around for it, and for those of you who have already been around for a long time, you have my eternal gratitude already. Whether you're someone who's a core regular on our discord, or someone who's just here to say thanks with a few passive dollars and read the occasional dev post from your phone without comment-- Thank you. I'm excited to be here with you. I hope you can share some of my optimism for the direction we go in from here. <3

Now the difficult part is logistics.

I don't have many specifics, so let's start with something many of you may have noticed as soon as you clicked on this post-- the patreon's name has updated. It's not just me you're going to be supporting here, it's the team as well. This is a titular change only for now, but expect me to update the tier rewards and description for Starlight development within the upcoming weeks.

It is an indication of the upcoming direction though. I can't talk all this good talk about focusing on the community and then go hoarding the money for myself. I will be taking a base amount of to cover my living expenses, because I need to be able to still work on this full time, but starting very soon the rest is going to the team. I don't know how that's going to work yet-- I have to ask myself questions like, is it better to make sure every contributor gets a small part as thanks, or is it better to focus the limited resources on, say, covering one person's rent so they can be full time as well? I don't know the answer to that yet, and I hate having to ask. Money is stupid, I just want to mak gaem...

It also means the door is going to be open to have some others on the team making these posts besides myself! I'm looking forward to giving folks the chance to talk directly because I feel like many of you don't know the team very well beyond cass and I, and god knows I get enough attention already lol

In general, this will be less about me, more about the team. That said, I am still heading up my name on the patreon page because as I've talked about in the past, I feel like it's a lot easier for a given random person to place trust in [me, as a singular named individual] as opposed to [a murky studio name that could have anyone behind it]. I joked earlier about my doubts of being a parasocial tyrant, but my role and my goal here, are for me to be a point of trust as a leader for the community and project. And obviously I am still doing development work too.

We'll have the experience of figuring this out together as several layers of a group. Myself, the dev team, you all, and the greater community-- the lines don't matter. We are a strong system, and we have the opportunity to prove that by making something special together and having a great time doing it.

Software development has a lot of existing freedom, flexibility, and tools for open source and group collaboration. So that's great, and gives us a wonderful jumping off point for the programming side of things.

That said,

Let's talk about how spoilers are ruining my life.

As everyone who's been around during development knows, I strive to not post anything that is going to take away from anyone's enjoyment of the game. However, where that line is varies for many people. Some people want to go in entirely blind and I want to enable them to do so, or at least give everyone the option of consent to spoilers.

But there are some things best kept under wraps altogether, because if the answer is "out there" even under a spoiler then there's no point in, say, theorycrafting. There's a lot of people on the forum who have enjoyed theorycrafting for reborn over the years, and (spoilers) there's a pretty key reveal at the end of main game that probably would have changed or even shut down a lot of that theorycrafting in these last three years. I am grateful that it worked out as well as it has-- but it's an example of the importance of preserving that. So what if there's something Big like that in the future too? Or what if I someday go out of pocket and just make a mystery game?

So, even aside from the logistics of coordination, I have to ask: How do I toe the line between trying to balance the consent to spoiler information with the availability of it while also trying to be totally transparent about the work and give as many people access as possible in an open-source-esque model development???

Right now, I have no idea. The question keeps me up at night. This is part of what we're going to have to explore and feel out as a community.

So anyway, Reborn.

Okay, back to earth.  To coordinate with GlitchXCity uploading the finished E4 theme, we're looking to do Public Release, like, within the next 24 hours. Game isn't perfect. There's still a fair bit of cats. Gonna have to do another patch after I finish writing this. But it's good enough and I'm stalling out other things by waiting longer and, like, emotionally? I need to be done.

One more huge thank you, thank you, THANK YOU to everyone who's helped us get so far <333

So, what happens with Reborn now?

Well, there'll be some bugfixing patches still, I'm sure... Some things like the Randomizer especially just need longer for people to find small issues with them by nature. But I don't have plans for anything more than that.

cass, however, cass has lots of plans. even now, cass is Out There, destroying the essentials back end and rewriting to be better. stronger.  and someone is going to need to test those changes too (eventually). fortunately, i hear we have an entire community of people to help. isn't that awesome? I think that's pretty awesome. Y'all awesome.

So anyway, another shoutout to Aie, one of the features included with the randomizer is a Private Build Channel. It allows us to hand out passwords and, if you authorize with it, you can pull a testing copy of the game in addition to the main public one. That is super useful since it means we can do our public release and keep you all in on a line of potential testing for new features and optimizations, which would be very helpful for us!

As for the rest of things, I'm effectively handing project lead status over to cass. She also has her own work and school stuff going on, but she's more involved with the future of this than I am (plus Rejuv... and Deso...) so the ball is in her court for future updates and publishing.

In the non-immediate future, we will probably also eventually open our dev server to folks like modders, or just anyone who wants to help out with some of the things that maybe weren't practical to do in the current release... such as gen 8? who knows. I don't. Per a previous discussion, I also might continue to help organize some to-dos around there or something.

In general, I'm obviously not going anywhere. This is already my home after all. But I'm going to be hands off for development for all but the largest issues and consultation.

For my part... people have asked me for years, because it's taken that long, if I'm going to take a break after finishing Reborn. And usually my answer was "no !!! i want to work on starlight !!!!" ...and that's still true... ...but I am going to accept a break.  I think it'll be better for my productivity long term, but it's mostly for health and reconnecting with the passage of time. Especially when trying to switch to a less-is-more mentality, I need to unlearn habits of waking up each day with the expectation of pushing myself forward to hit a point of completion i felt like i should have reached years ago.

I'll still be posting here, I think. I'll still be in the community as much as usual, hell, maybe more? And maybe we can get a word in from some other folks on the team in that time too or something. Then it's back up and at 'em for Starlight. I will be eternally thankful  for anyone who's up to stick around for that ride and see what kind of experience we can make it.

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