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mutantdevle

Moderation Team

From: Hell

Joined: 2015-03-31

Posts: 3,848

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Everybody Edits || Our Silence

Happy new year everyone! It’s been almost a year since our last official update, so we’d like to share a little bit about why that is, and what our plans are for the future.

First, I’d like to clarify that Everybody Edits! has not been cancelled. Progress over the last year has been much, much slower, but we are hopeful to see an improvement in 2023.

More than 60% of all assets are finished - smileys, a portion of the accessories, quite a few tilesets & packs, some auras, etc. We’re excited to see audio play a significant role in EE!, but not much progress has been made there so far. But, slowly, we are making progress towards finalising everything.

Programming is close to being finished but has been halted for a while. The two Ukrainian developers we had left, who were mentioned in our previous update, are no longer working on the game. We do not wish to go into details about why because that is between them and their families. As mentioned last time, other members of our team either fled Ukraine at the start of the war or are living in Russia. Their situations have not changed, and they are understandably unable to return to working on the game.

At the moment, Fixel is our only available programmer, and we are therefore in need of new developers. While we appreciate that many members of the community are eager to help due to their experience with the game, we want to continue our business model of hiring freelance developers who can devote more time to programming and can keep up their work long-term.

A plan for game design has been in place since Satanya acquired Everybody Edits and has been discussed with many veterans of the game. The approach by previous ownership of talented individuals working in their spare time (with the line between programmer and game designer being a little blurred) is not compatible with how EE! has been developed so far or our intentions for its future. However, if we think there is anyone worth considering for a paid freelance position (in other roles too), we may contact some people privately.

So our main reason for our minimal updates is that we haven’t had much news to share, and most of the news has been bad news. However, you may also have noticed that individual members of the staff team have also been engaging with the community less frequently and that we have more generally been teasing less about the game's future. Unfortunately, the reason for this is primarily due to a small number of community members who have made an effort to harass both members of staff and other members of the community, or otherwise just make socialising with the community an exhausting experience.

The vast majority of the community has become inactive and is patiently waiting for updates such as this one - and we hope to see you join us and become more involved with the community again once the game is ready for release! Most of the remaining active community has been fun to engage with. It is always rewarding to see everyone’s interest in the game and excitement at small teases, such as details of a planned mechanic or progress on a graphic. However, the toxic minority has hurt our willingness to engage with the community as we know that each time we do, it often results in us, our colleagues, or community members, being attacked or trash-talked in spaces we have little to no control over.

So with that in mind, the main purpose of this update is that we’d like to officially announce that we do not intend to make any more of these update posts or engage much with the community until the game is ready to be marketed for release. While we are not mandating that our staff avoid the community, most of us have agreed that we want to take a step away - myself included. Those who do stick around have been asked not to discuss game progress with the community.

As part of this, we will no longer be making official posts on the forums, the EE! Twitter will become dormant, and the EE! Discord server has become read-only. Additionally, the Everybody Edits blog is officially coming to an end. Essentially, we want to create a gap of silence between now and when we’re ready to advertise the game. We intend that our next update post will be a gameplay trailer for the game. We do not anticipate giving any updates sooner than this for any reason other than the worst-case scenario of cancelling the game.

We have spoken about a timeframe for the game’s release internally; however, we do not have any dates that we wish to commit to publically. Therefore, do not expect any updates from us any time soon. It may be months or even years before we are ready.

While the EE! Discord has now been switched to read-only, joining the server and turning @everyone notifications on would be the best way to ensure you get our next update as soon as it’s ready, rather than checking in manually every few weeks or months. You can find the discord here: https://discord.gg/2kZYX6bFZq.

This was not an easy decision for us to make, but there are several reasons why we have chosen this direction. First of all, as mentioned, engaging with the community has often been exhausting for us. By taking this step back, we are hoping to regain any lost passion for the project. This will also allow us to give all our energy and focus to making progress towards the final product. Finally, while it has been traditional in the history of Everybody Edits for future updates to be teased and shared, the vast majority of the gaming industry does not share much outside of marketing. We believe that aligning with this will help convey the more professional tone we are striving to achieve with EE!.

We do plan to engage with the community again when we’re ready. We hope to see the forums, Discord and Twitter become wholesome places for the community to share their love and anticipation for the game again. But only when we’re ready to hype everyone up for the game's release. For now, we want to remain silent until what we have to say is worth saying, and we’d like to ask everybody who has a true love for the game to remain patient and respectful to us and to each other until then.

TL;DR: development is going to resume at a slow pace. The Discord has been set to read-only, and most staff will no longer be active within the community so that we can focus on the project.

Thank you for your support and continued patience,
-mutant.

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