Hi everyone, what a busy month, we managed to get one of our biggest projects done and we're definitely gonna talk about that, so get ready to read!
OutFox Serenity
If you haven't seen it already, a community pack was in the works and is now released with OutFox Alpha 4.9.10, the community team worked hard on this with the help from you to make this possible.
You can read all about it here, but let's talk more about it, the progress, the problems we faced, and solutions, after all, transparency is the source of trust.
The announcement of a community pack
A new version of OutFox was coming, and it was one of our best-known versions yet, it added support for many gamemodes, new functions, new features, it was awesome and our team was also hyped about it so much that we came with the idea of a community pack after we saw the old attempts of it. We didn't really expect it to be as big as it is today but many people found the idea awesome so we ran with it.
Submissions
Now that we know a community pack is what people expect we need to open the contributions, with the help from Lirodon we created a page to open content submissions (which is still open btw) and saw the wave of people wanting to help, after some time we also created categories and channels for our Discord server as almost everyone who wanted to contribute was already there.
Chart Organization
This is the part where things get a bit tricky, we had internal files for up-to-date submissions and templates for our members, it felt good enough at the start but we quickly saw the problem.
Most submissions included other charts from notes that are not completed yet, attacks were also affecting charts from other people, speed mods, changes, warps, and we had to waste way more time than expected fixing that.
An unexpected situation happened with one of our community members where helping us manage the content got almost impossible so we had less management than usual which made things slower.
We also noticed some of our internal files were in an unexpected folder, and more than half the files were missing because of that, WHOOPS.
The testing week
After some time we were able to things done to launch a testing week were people to help find missing content/issues with release candidates, it was really important and helped us discover what we couldn't find.
The first day was a bomb of issues, but it quickly turned into just a few issues here and there later, this means the community is active and helpful and we thank everyone for that, really.
Oh wait a second, this is a community pack and it includes charts, charts have notes and people want to know how hard those notes are, this means...RATING!!
Yes...we didn't have a standard rating yet, but thanks to our active community we quickly were able to decide one, for dance, it was very split with ITG and DDR X, we choose DDR as more concrete reasons were given for it. The community then helped by re-rating every chart for every mode, which you can see here, again thanks to everyone for helping.
Music license
Some content wasn't licensed with CC, it was only given as a right for Project OutFox to distribute, while is good enough for us to release a game with it, it isn't for us to host on Github, we choose to respect the artist license decision and remove individual files from music that do not include/use a CC license and improved our credits to reach out to more content of the artist.
Launch!
With charts, graphics, music, everything ready we decided to launch the pack with next version of OutFox so branding content started to be made, Lirodon created this awesome trailer and the new splash screen which calls back to Serenity, our website was also changed to fit with those changes.
What we learned
Making a pack is both fun and rewarding for both the team and the community, it requires great work but it sure pays off. For the next volume, we will be using our Github repository to better manage the files with the content creators so they can interact in real-time with the files we have. With the experience we got, expect fewer errors and more communication between you and the team on how everything is going, this is also true for OutFox Development Team.
New Project
konko-module-system (by Sudospective)
Konko is a module system based on the Kitsu template that allows for beat-based tweens without a gameplay screen or even a song.
Konko is object-oriented. You can create nodes that act as extended actors that can have beat-based tweens appended to them. You can also create a global-ready or update function to add beat-based tweens to existing nodes.
Projects Update
Tiny-Web
Updated to add konko-module-system
Aqui-Alpha-Noteskins
Got a 2021 update (part 1) with updated noteskin graphics.
smtheme-soundwaves-community
Got update with Alpha 4.9.9 theme content.
kitsu-template
Updated code structure, nodebuilder, and more functions.
OutFoxWeb
Updated content to reflect website changes.
Tiny-Webini
Update content to reflect with OutFoxWeb changes.
RyutoSetsujin-Customizations
Got a major update to its repository, content, and naming.
TF_Wheels
Fixed sorts, added new splash, added taiko support, fixed metrics, and new DDR HD note skins.
OutFox-ja, OutFoxPTBR, OutFox-fr and OutFox-Translation
Updated to add the new lines for OutFox 4.9.10
That's it for this month, everyone, the team is gonna rest a bit and update the community pack with leftovers, but this doesn't mean exciting content isn't on the works, something new is coming to OutFox...just wait.