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[NEWSLETTER] October 2020 - Printable Version

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[NEWSLETTER] October 2020 - skinstealer - 10-02-2020

HOMEBREW DEVIANTS NEWSLETTER
OCTOBER 2020
 
Happy October, everybody! Welcome to the first revival of our old newsletter system- now with monthly updates instead of weekly, because god knows we don’t have time for that. Here you’ll find updates on everything we’ve done in the past month, plans for the upcoming month, topics we want to encourage discussion on, and things we’re looking to get feedback on. Please feel free to use this thread as a discussion board- while we love having the nice, instant conversations of Discord, keeping things talked about here will allow outside people to participate and keep easier-to-read logs for us to reference for later!

What did we do in September?

Changelog:
-Ashtray updated twice- Patrons are three updates ahead! 
-Dopple Effect re-launched + updated twice
-Tethered Episode 3 released
-Prismic Sanctum updated twice
-Egress updated 
-Wiki updates can be found here- lots of character pages have been uploaded!
-TCPdex update in progress…
-Corvice species thread released
-Fandev section released
-Playlist section released (and playlist uploading started)
 
The entire team has been putting efforts into a massive overhaul of both how our internal structure and the outward facing community works for 2021, something most people here are probably aware of by now. One of our main focuses so far has been making a formal website that serves as a hub for our projects and resources- something we’ve needed for a long time. Molasses and Mraof have been working especially hard on the website management end of things, and Molasses has been chipping away at branding and layout work- check out some concepts for our new mascot!

[Image: lqa9uFk.png][Image: lOMobuZ.png]

Mortis has been working hard on the Void Session edit (and its mirror), and is almost finished- progress is expected to be complete by next week, but a public release may take extra time based on how long it takes to get promotional material done up. Uploading backlog to Furry Life Online is still happening slowly, but the goal is to get a fully populated gallery of all of the Skinstealers’ work- the first of its kind! As part of the overhaul effort, Mortis has also been adding piles of pages to the wiki, namely for characters. These aren’t particularly detailed yet, but should serve as good bases for the community to add onto as more information is released in projects.  There’s also a playlist and fandev section added to the forum now- enjoy some new ways to interact with Morbit and the community!

Lastly from the Skinstealers- a new major project is in the works, set for 2021 release! They can’t release much information for now outside of the Patreon chat, but it started development in this past September and has a lot to do with the relationship the system has with art and the internet. Look forward to it!

Ashtray has also been in full swing, taking up most of Mortis and Comorant’s week’s work time...but we’re in the home stretch now, and it’s looking to be finished by the end of the year. 

[Image: 5Dzi2mp.png?1]

Comorant’s solo work has mainly involved relaunching Dopple Effect and updating it twice- check it out if you haven’t already! It serves as an interesting prequel of sorts to Crankshaft Rafflesian, and the environments and designs are incredibly surreal…

[Image: zd3n2v9.png]

Pear and Lucy have been working on the return of Pre-Alpha Session, and while we can’t show anything of it yet outside of the Patreon chat, the panels are looking sleek as hell. In addition, Pear’s opened up species commissions- two new species morphs have been added to the canon!
[Image: Qlkbs2l.png][Image: vH8AY8Y.png]

Knux400 has been neck deep in working on a major TCPdex update, the majority of which we’re keeping our mouths shut about...and if you figure it out, don’t spoil it! We want the big reveal to be a surprise! In addition, he’s also launched a Darkest Night RP event on Discord- you can check it out here. It’s low investment roleplay lasting 3 days, but sign ups and prep are open now!

Ari and Seth have been very busy with moving, but Ari has been working on Prismic Sanctum and Tethered, and got updates out for both. If you haven’t checked these projects out yet, now is a great time.

Zenthis has been at work on Egress, both on the forums and for the mirror. Egress had an update on the last day of this month, just barely in time to be covered by this newsletter. The mirror is currently readable but not yet done. 
[Image: KjXOY1m.png]

What are we working on in October?

Overall, we plan on continuing with more of our overhaul plans, and getting a significant amount of it done by the end of October. Our biggest goal is to have the majority of the website done by then and have something presentable, though our hard deadline is by the end of the year. The majority of our website’s written content is done already, but there’s a lot to do with layout, backend, visual assets, and getting everything pulled together as a cohesive piece. Still, once we get it all together, we think it’ll be something we can be really proud of! 

Comorant is planning on doing some Halloween themed shenanigans, mainly in the form of Crankshaft updates. Dopple Effect will also continue to get updates (at least two planned this month, ideally), and a Masa con Papas update would also be ideal to try and start it up again. A oneshot would also be nice, but isn’t guaranteed- we’ll see how it shakes out!

Mortis is planning on finishing up the Void Session edit next week and getting promo material for that in order ASAP, and starting to promote that. Wiki work will continue at a steady clip with the goal of getting everything filled out on a basic level by the end of the year- definitely not a “done by the end of October” goal, but progress will be made for sure this month! Aside from that, expect work on the new major project to be talked about heavily in the Patreon chat, and probably some updates to an Explicit rated project we won’t talk about here.

Both Mortis and Comorant will continue updating Ashtray, and have no plans of stopping that until it’s done. Not getting done this month, but next month...next month it just might...

Knux will keep going at that TCPdex update until it’s blasted to bits, while Mortis sprays him with a squirt bottle for every meme-related ability name. 

Zenthis is planning on at least one Egress update as per usual this month, in addition to finishing the mirror.The Egress mirror should be fully completed by the end of the month. Other than that, Zenthis will be helping with other minor website work.

Community Involvement

Let’s get some discussion going- we want to promote specific worldbuilding topics each month to help us develop Morbit on a deeper level, and also get feedback on specific areas where we think we could use improvement. Once again, please use the forums to discuss things if you can- this leaves a better record for us and reference for the future! We absolutely will lose your Discord messages and we want to be able to take everything into account here and involve all potential participants.

So: worldbuilding topics for this month! This month’s prompts involve witches, wizards, and Darkest Night! Being October, it’s time to get spooky- while Morbit witches and wizards aren’t as inherently spooky as they are in our world, there’s still a lot of potential for weird shenanigans, and we figure there’s probably a lot of questions to be asked! You can ask us questions in this thread here, make your own threads in Fandev, add pages to the wiki, start up roleplays, you name it! No matter how new you are to these concepts, no question is too silly and the more we’re asked, the more we can publicly develop and reveal the concepts and slap that shit on the wiki for future readers. Everybody wins!

The feedback we’re looking for this month is regarding character enrichment and fan involvement. One of the main things we’ve gotten input on recently is a sense of character oversaturation- everybody’s got fan characters at this point and we need to find ways for people to use these characters and get a richer experience out of having them. We want to find ways to let people take all these characters that live in Morbit and help them start really fleshing them out in ways that make them feel more fulfilling to have, be that through roleplaying, forum games, anything that people can suggest. Along those lines, we need to start encouraging fans to be more involved in the community and providing resources for them to set up their own events and activities- what do you need to help get things rolling? What features would help you enrich this community? Let us know!

As a final note- big thanks to Vic for helping us out with the TCPdex update and community outreach in general this month! Welcome to the mod team, and thank you so much for helping this community!

Thank you all for supporting us, and we hope to hear from you in this thread!