Before we begin with our v5 introspective tour, I must stress that the majority of us like to keep a strict separation between content and personality. The dev team's secretism in regards to who is developing what content existed not out of any malice for the community or out of privacy of an inner group, but rather out of a desire to present the latent content as it was produced. If people wanted to come out and disclose that yes, they made X content, we were fine with that. But we didn't want to explicitly advertise our stuff as "Y's Map: X Man" or "X weapon coded by Y" for the sole desire of wanting to keep the game as a love letter to the Mega Man series first and foremost.
The concept of a full development team sweep post-v5a has been thrown around for a while, and has been for the most part met with willingness. v5's main purpose was to take advantage of a lighter content load and introduce a number of-and-coming content creators to the team to help shift development burden off of Ivory and Shade Guy, who had to brute force through most of v4's content. There are probably specifics to this that are escaping my memory, but I know that in particular we extended offers to Rozark, Gospel, and Knux. Rozark and Knux were invited for their progress on their own personal map packs, while Gospel was invited for his success in the recent FTM competition. While you can cite this reason for Knux and Rozark as well (considering they both actually got medals), Gospel's integrity towards other fan projects like DOS and RMF2 sparked a desire to help him grow.
MM8BDM has evolved even further since FTM of course, which is why I understand the concern for the lack of "active" members on the team. I stress that I understand v5's been taking eternities, and how much our scope has expanded since. For the sake of not creating development hell and conflict of motivation and all that we'll try to stick with our current team - especially since our final goal is close on the horizon - but if we find ourselves in desperation we acknowledge that there's still help to turn to.
Concrete Man - Lego
Tornado Man - LlamaHombre
Splash Woman - Kapus
Plug Man - Cold Noodles
Jewel Man - Copy Robot
Hornet Man - Rozark
Magma Man - Ivory
Galaxy Man - Gospel
And finally, the Wily Castle maps, produced by Freeman, Lego, and Korby respectively.
Names alone don't tell the full tales of the hardships each map has gone through. The v5 readme won't be able to tell tales of how Myroc was originally assigned to Concrete Man, nor how Magma and Jewel stand as ends of an era for content creators who wish to pass the torch for a future unbound. Blaze's involvement with MM9GAL, Yuri's assistance in MM9SPL. How many fucking times MM9DW1's been passed along until assigned to help fulfill v5's initial goal: help develop content creators themselves.
We've tested these maps a number of times, and have modified them internally to meet both our own concerns and those that the community as a whole share. MM9DW3 was sent back to the scrapyard by Korby himself out of recognition of possible improvement, which is why it turned from one of the first maps done for v5 into one of the last.
Hell, I alone can't possibly recap everything that's occured on the internal scale. King Dumb, Rozark, Kapus, so on and so forth have helped paint pictures that I've been unable to. I don't have clear memories of parts of early development, so stuff like what happened to Knux or what happened before v4c's completion are completely lost to me (Especially since I no longer have logs for any skype chat past like last November). I'm sure I won't satisfy everyone's itches and concerns, but I can only hope that I can provide some level of leverage between the development team and the community. If not for the community at large, this game would've died out long back. But you sat through v4c's frustratingly long release time, and insist on being supportive of the core game despite some unease behind the development team.
I can't even necessarily blame you guys for feeling somewhat nervous, but feelings of betrayal are not those that we can sit around feeling comfortable with.
If it helps reassure anything, I can confirm that most of these people who are consistently absent in MM8BDM have been either completely idle/absent throughout development or have stuck to mostly working on their own work and as a result haven't left any large shifts or trends in the development process. Hell, some have even recognized their smaller involvement overall and have made an effort to pick up the game more.
We're going to do our best to conclude from here and go through with a reimagining of the development team afterwards. We absolutely acknowledge there's more we could be doing, but when we're this far into development it's difficult to take radical steps without risking something more vital to the game itself.
There are smaller steps we can do to help conclude development at a quicker rate, however, and I'll be starting up one of those almost immediately after the conclusion of this post. I know criticism came up over the v5 Mapping Thread for being too general, but in this stage of the game where weapons should be our primary focus, having a general idea as to where progress should start would help us out immensely.
So I'll be writing the official v5 Weapons Thread whenever I can. Please contribute to that when it goes up.
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