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@Veterankyl you're all good. I have to close this out after that. Thank you everyone for your support. I'll do my best to make sure everyone is part of the ensemble cast. I can't make any promises on when I'll be done, but I promise it'll be worth the wait. Maybe. Stay tuned.

@Bmon I'll try and address what I perceive to be the presented concerns: Lack of Transparency / Communication on the Git Hidden Dev Channels Slipping back into past bad practicies I'll give my 2 cents on this as someone who has served in most roles on the Dev team (excluding -headcoder & -balance team) as well as general staff leadership. This has little to do with the development team's commitment to being open and honest and everything to do with time and energy. Lack of Transparency / Communication Back in January/December, contributors were opening PRs at around 10-15 PRs A DAY, we had 2 active headcoders, 2 review team members, and 2 commit access members all with varying availability (some with almost none), it was impossible to keep up with the rate of these PRs and also provide the kind of communication you want, this rate of PRs decreased into the second semester of schooling for most of us but did not largely stop until late February; Furthermore, most people on the design team (such as myself) also serve in other roles and have to balance responsibilities. It is exhausting to keep up with it and I'm not always going to sacrifice 15 minutes of my day sometimes to leave reasoning behind a PR objection every time I have one (especially if I'm leaving 3-4 a week). It's not because I don't want to be transparent it's because I'm doing other important things like a) talking to my girlfriend b) doing my homework c) dealing with a dumpster fire in staffcoord as a HOS or d) simply doing code reviews / merges to get our PR count down. Making our dev-channel public will not fix this and will make it worse, it wont make me be more transparent, I will be less transparent and here's why: Hidden Dev Channels Players and contributors will likely never truly understand the perspective/experience/needs of the development team or staff team until they serve on them or a similar team. This isn't a jab at our contributors' empathy or behavior, it's just a simply a matter of having that collection of micro-experiences that changes the lens in which you look at things. The single hidden dev channel we have on the public discord is the only channel that is exclusive to development team members (it even excludes most GA's) minus a single headcoder-leadership channel we have on the staff discord. Why is this important? The obvious points have been covered, exploit discussion and GitHub disciplinary action discussion. Here's what's not necessarily been talked about I need a space where I can talk freely and privately with dev people I trust 100% It shields certain dev/staff politics from public view, all of us do not agree on everything and it can get to the point where we have fights behind closed doors. I do not want contributors or any player for that matter to be privy to what is said or to take it as an opportunity to butt in on a conversation they do not have a share in. Sometimes things that are said that are not necessarily true in the heat of the moment and has to be approached very cautiously and tenderly. This may even be the reason why certain controversial objections are not written out thoroughly, its a difficult choice for multiple dev team members to be openly in contradiction with each other on a PR because it reflects poorly on our collective vision and its invites all of us to participate in a potentially energy-draining drawn-out discussion, so we often work it out in this channel. Privacy is important to everyone, it's hard enough to find people who will invest the amount of time they do in our development team + are nearly completely in-line with leadership + we're able to work with them. I realize that we can look as if we're slipping back into bad past practices and its certainly always a concern that is on the back of my mind, I'm glad you bring this up because its always an important topic to revisit. I certainly don't think you have any bad intentions in mind either. More communication could always be better and our dev team needs to work on coming together to establish a central design vision. At this moment, most of our dev team is in the busiest moments of their year (school, works, life, etc) and have to balance it all with their responsibilites in a volunteer organization (i.g. paradise). We're going to be committed to being better about justifying objections in the future, however.

https://discord.com/channels/145533722026967040/499000353312735233/1088431380842684476

Lil update. Had some computer problems and general lack of motivation. Going to try and start this up again and figure out why my maps stopped compiling right and throwing errors. Really not sure what's wrong, probably something I'm doing settings wise. But I do want to try and figure this out.

Putting them here or DMing me on Discord works just fine. Either one! Progress has been all but halted due to holidays and such, along with trying to figure out this error with the map maker. But I'm going to try to resume progress in January.

I am a huge fan of RPG maker games, cant wait to see a demo! How would you like to receive said pictures from our characters? Shall we just put them as a post here in this thread? An idea that came up spontaneously: Put Tom the vault mouse in front of the vault entrance when leaving arrivals, maybe as a first NPC to get a quest or something