Not-Quite-Progress Update (11/11/2024)
We don't want to bog you down with naming this "The Future Of Rebaked" or "Important Announcement About Rebaked" or some other nonsense because one--we think "not-quite-progress update" is a funny name. Two, those types of names have a connotation to them that we'd like to maybe avoid, if that's okay. And three, we respect your time here.
We'll be real with you; this project's future is about to be very, very long, or very, very, VERY short, and it basically hinges on, well, you guys.
We don't really like to acknowledge it (mostly since to us, it comes off moreso as complaining than anything actually helpful), but for the past little while now, stuff has mostly slowed down beyond writing (which was my area of expertise anyways). GingerBrave's Tale's script has been done for a hot minute now, and we're roughly 60% of the way through City of Wizards, give-or-take? But, well, for a webcomic, you need artists, and we're. Bad. At that.
Now, the entire crux of this project from the get-go was to be a collaborative one; we didn't wanna hog up anything. But, well, to be a little blunt towards myself here… I think I took too long, WHOOPS. We think that, in retrospect, the way we organized the scheduling is ABSOLUTELY the culprit. We have nobody to blame but ourselves here, and we take full responsibility for that. But, well, the end result is the same, in that it's been… uh, pretty darn isolating, being what feels like the literal only person keeping this project going.
Now, we could always just, KEEP writing. But also, we don't want to drag this out any longer if we think it's… well, not a losing battle. Never say never, y'know? Someone could find this in the back catalogue of the internet and decide to finish it for fun, or maybe the one person maintaining it will finally see the light at the end of the tunnel and get a proper release. That's kind of the beauty of collaborative projects like this!
But, well, we see burnout when we see it, and we don't want to keep forcing it, y'know? We've seen damn well how it can backfire, and while there are some triumphant success stories where, despite it all, it all still turned out good, it can also just as easily give you a HECK of an ego complex. And, uh, sorry! We don't think we want to do that one!
But as for us (read: the project org & their system)… Before you ask, don't worry; we're doing alright over here on a personal level! We realize it's stressful as heck lately, so we want to get that out of the way right now.
Actually, if you're worried we're burned out in particular, it's quite the opposite. In the past few months, a LOT has changed over here, and it's given us a lot of experience with projects of this caliber we simply did not have when we started Rebaked. We don't want to shamelessly plug them here, uh, none of them involve Cookie Run and we already plug them enough in our personal spaces! And, hey, if someone ever finds this and decides to finish the job, we'd be glad to lend our help--whatever form it takes.
As for what was already done for the project; we do not want to just kinda leave this rotting on a tumblr blog, google doc, and a discord server, are you CRAZY?! We don't promise an ETA on this, but we would like to at least mirror the full script for Issue 1 (GingerBrave's Tale) and what was made for City of Wizards 1 onto our own personal website, with proper credit of course.
That way, you can still at least read what was made, even if not in a pretty comic format. It's the literal least we could do. And, of course, while we won't write it out in the same format, we would at least like to share what the ending we had in mind for City of Wizards 1 would have been. (Also, no, we are NOT closing the Discord.)
You might be wondering where we go from here, especially if there is no hero at the very end to help get a proper release going.
Admittedly, we don't want to make any real promises; we mean, jeez, you saw how well THAT went. But we do have SOME ideas for where to go from here, and we're hoping that our experiences from our current projects could help make it come true. We won't say anything more than that until it either becomes extremely clear it won't come to pass, or a trailer drops; that much, we can promise!
It… feels weird to write a post like this, for this, and not have anything to plug, nor any real confidence in a "see you next week". Well, I mean, we could always ask any interested artists to tag along, but again; if nobody does that, then we're kind of at an impasse, huh? If we say something next week, we guess it means it worked out! If not, uh, see you whenever we put the scripts on our neocities, we guess.
Well, whether you've followed this from the very start, or just started following it at what may be its end; whether you helped work on this project, or just wanted to read it, we thank you all the same. We're sorry it's like this at the moment, but we're happy to have worked on this all the same.
If this ends up being the last post, here's hoping we'll one day meet again, under--hopefully--much more triumphant terms! But, well, if we make more after this, we hope to see you here, too. ;P