do you think god has anything stronger than him to fear?

Introduction

Hello, dear OUTDATEDers! It's been a while!

How's your day been? You get any good Sleep, drink a lot of water? Hahaha, I'm just kidding. I don't care about any of that shit.

I'm here to finally deliver on what should have been the May devlog - while I was initially going to going to post it then, mainly personal troubles ended up getting in the way, and so as a result this devlog ended up getting pushed back a couple of months.

A couple of months is fortunately not forever, though! I'm considering myself back on my feet now, and I'm ready to tell you guys about what's been going on over at the dev team!

Development Status

Nothing. Jack shit. And I'm not even kidding this time.

You remember the anniversary devlog, right? Well, Here's an embarrassing secret that I'm about to share with y'all: that was more or less everything that we managed to make for the mod that wasn't a major spoiler for what was to come. In other words, we haven't done much this past year...

But I want to fix that! I want the team to be able to make progress quickly, or at least organize everything in such a way that efficiency can be at least promised.

To achieve such a goal would take a while, though. It would be a long, grueling road, with torturous trials ahead, and it's possible that it could even result in the cancellation of this mod!

But I had to try. It was all or nothing.

I had to make some CHANGES.

Death Row

And one of those changes, unfortunately, required me to kick a bunch of people from my team.

Sound bad? Yeah. But the reason isn't as erratic as you think as you would presume it to be. For the Full Release's production (for those who STILL HAVEN'T GOTTEN THe MEMO YET, V2 has been reclassified as a Full Release - calling it a V2 would imply that the Giggle Demo was an intended V1, which is not true.) the initial idea was for me to get a bunch of new people on the team so that progress could be made all of the time, even when I couldn't work. The eventual outcome of the situation, though, was...well...

Most of the people that were brought on-team were either barely working or were pushed into a spot where they had nothing to do. With too many people to keep track of (with "who does what", for example), the excess amount of team members ended up being one of the primary factors leading to the eventual falling into dev Hell for the project. I needed to fix this eventually: to weed out those that were only taking up space and keep those that were able to serve a purpose & were motivated enough to stick around and try to do mod work more than occasionally.

as of Speaking, 16 team members (yours truly also included!) remain in the OUTDATED dev team, ready & on standby to work whenever we can! (Hopefully this number won't grow any smaller over time.)

Some decisions can end up having negative effects though, and while the decision to lay off people was more or less taken positively, one or two members didn't react so kindly to being laid off, and promptly left in a rush. If you see any ex-members around telling people about "bad workplace conditions" in the team, try not to take them too seriously and forward to them that I Apologize for having to kick them out of the team! Business is business, and I try not to be too biased when it comes to my decisions. To lay off people was not because of any personal motive.

What else did you do?

Laying off members hasn't been the only major change to the team & development, though! I've done a couple of other things to make sure that we're at least in a position to make progress whenever we have the time to do so:

• I've simplified the plans for the mod a little bit - Not to imply that the idea for the final product has been minimized drastically, though, not at all! The three primary phases for development still exist, and I still hope to get to all of them eventually, however the content inside each phase has been minimized to a smaller but still doable scale so that the chances of us dropping the mod due to mass exhaustion is less likely.

• Probably One of our riskier decisions, but could potentially also be worth it: we've decided to restart our code from scratch. While our previous main coder did a glorious job with putting everything together at first, over time even they ended up losing track of how much code was finished & how much code was left to be implemented. With restarting back from square one, we can once again know how much we have to do, and as long as we keep our eyes on the code this time, we won't forget again! (Probably...)

• Drumroll, please...we made a trello!

(I probably could have used a more convenient website for this, but whatever.)

With the Trello comes an easier way for me especially to keep track of progress! All of the tasks are organized into their respective categories, and then there are two extra categories dedicated to not-yet-claimed tasks as well as already finished tasks. Sound trivial? Well, it isn't! With this bad boy, we can basically stop & start development any time we want to, and with the Trello to keep track of the specifics of progress we most likely won't be losing our spot anytime soon!

who want loreshts

Not necessarily a CHANGE, but still something noteworthy: I've been making a lore document!

OUTDATED's lore isn't exactly what I'd call "sprawling", but it's certainly very detailed, and it's also important that others know the kind of writing that they're working with as they work with me to bring this project to fruition.

THere's not much I can show in the doc, though, sorry! It's top secret. :)

Initially this section was going to be larger, containing people's out-of-context reactions to reading the lore document, however nobody seemed to be actually interested in doing so, so...this is all I can really show, I guess.

Ah, Dirk H. Strider. My favorite Monika.EXe character...

DREAMFUCK

Another thing that's also been making development slow (aside from personal problems & academic concerns) are my numerous side projects! Despite the pleas and moans of common sense, OUTDATED is not the only project of mine on the table - I've got plenty more creative outlets to charge up for everyone else's enjoyment!

One of these side projects some of you may already know of: DREAMFUCK, my Yume Nikki X FNF mod! It's already got a demo out at the time of speaking, and I plan to keep working towards a full release with this mod, too. (I haven't forgotten about this project though, too, don't worry! You will always Remain my prize child...)

not much I can really show for DREAMFUCK here other than this mockup teaser, unfortunately.

But let's not get too off-track! It's time to get to what most people have been waiting for! >:D

Sneak Peeks

Like said before, progress has been very sporadic and not much tends to get done accordingly, but small progress is progress nonetheless! I may as well show y'all some small things just to show everyone that development hasn't just all been sitting around on our Asses.

Starting with new icons for Grubble! Hi, Karkat! It's nice to see you around again :)

I also have some concept art relating to Nutsucci - I recently decided to include her back in the mod's plans, and I happen to have some very interesting ideas for her! What kind of ideas, you may ask? Well, you'll just have to wait and see...

Casting Call(???)

...Oh.

Oh, yeah.

I almost forgot. The casting call...

You'll get to see some more information in the Twitter thread that was linked above this image, but basically we want to look for a couple of new VAs for monika, Yuri, Sayori & a strange, new mystery character that you guys definitely haven't seen at all before!!! Ooooo!!!

Be sure to check it out whenever you have the time. Remember to spread the word!

Scrapped Content

Since we're here, I might as well showcase an unused song for you guys to chew on. Here's the beta version of B????????, one of the two songs where MC goes against Sayori!

...Huh. That's strange. Why's the name censored?

...

eh. I suppose that isn't too big of a deal.

cytal, the composer of the song, wasn't too happy with how this version came out, and so he's decided to remake the song from scratch so that it can fully flourish the way he wants it to! It isn't quite done yet as I'm typing this, but I've listened to what he's made of the new version so far, and I can easily say that it surpasses the beta by a long shot - I hope you all can agree with this statement too when the time comes!

Conclusion

Whew! Wow, this devlog took a while to make. Too much of a while...wow. Sorry about that.

I wouldn't say that life's been overly harsh on me lately, but it certainly hasn't been pulling its punches, either - there's always something going on in my life that causes me to get distracted from working on my projects, and that kind of wasted time also weighs on my conscience a lot. I want to get things done as soon as possible! I value progress!

OUTDATED is still in a bit of a shaky spot, though, and since these CHANGES have just been applied, only time will be able to tell whether or not they benefit the team. In the meantime, though, I'll try not to sweat it too much - even with my ambitious & clear-cut plans, this is still a freelance project. Nobody's getting paid for this! I'm fine with the idea of progress still being occasional as long as progress is being made in general. Anything is better than staying in stasis (dev hell).

I certainly hope progress will be able to speed up over the next few months, especially with school gradually coming back to all of us. It's August, after all, and summer's nearly over at this point. Jeez. I really did waste a lot of time...

For those that are still concerned with the Demo 3 that I mentioned last devlog, don't worry, I haven't forgotten - My goal is to have said demo release by Q1 of next year! Maybe an improbable task, especially considering where the rest of the team & I are right now, but it's a goal that I want to at least try to reach! It's better we reach for the stars and hit the fence than reach for the fence and hit the ground, after all.

The next devlog (which I expect to be released sometime in December, as I am planning to space out these devlogs between seasons instead of months so that the team doesn't need to work overtime just to supply content for the next big post) will probably determine for sure whether or not this project will be certified to prosper - once again, it's unclear right now whether or not the CHANGES I've just instated with work, and part of me carries an extreme/doubt worry that I won't be able to reach the summit and finish this project the way I want to. I have to keep trying, though. It's the only thing I can do at this point.

If I can't make this, chances are I'll probably never be able to make anything this elaborate ever again.

If the next devlog doesn't turn out to be a giant "SORRY, WE'RE CANCELLED" post, I want to take the time to decorate these posts little bit more! These logs certainly do their job, but they don't really carry enough artistic flare, and I want these winding paragraphs of text to feel more inviting to read! (Think of Toby's Fangamer newsletters, or TS!Underswap's own "dev updates". Now those are some teams that know what they're doing!)

...Ah, jeez, but I'm rambling again, aren't I? Sorry, sorry, that's a habit of mine, ahaha! I like talking a lot.

Happy (end of) Summers, everyone, and until next time! (if we don't die of hypothermia by winter)