It has been quite a while since the last blog post; some of you may be unaware of the many things that have happened since then. Unfortunately, we have made the decision that this blog is going to be discontinued. The blog holds a special place in the hearts of Everybody Edits (EE) fans, so it is very sad to see it end. Perhaps one day a new blog will be created to continue sharing news about our beloved franchise. But this blog, the original, is coming to an end. In this blog post, I would like to inform you about everything that has happened since the last blog post and why we are choosing to be silent until the release of the new Everybody Edits game.
In the last update, Xenonetix announced that he was stepping down as owner and left a parting gift of Everybody Edits Offline (EEO), a place where you can play and create Everybody Edits worlds in single-player. This is still available to download below if you fancy a boost of nostalgia. If you weren’t able to download your worlds from the original EE in time, then you can download them from the archive here: https://forums.everybodyedits.com/viewtopic.php?id=47348.
Since then, Satanya has been the owner of the game. At the end of 2020, she made this post: https://forums.everybodyedits.com/viewtopic.php?id=47330 to introduce herself and the new team. We initially hosted a logo contest, sought feedback to help design the new moderation system, and featured interviews with some of the new staff – all as a way of keeping the community entertained while you wait for news about EE’s sequel.
A sequel/reboot to Everybody Edits has been something that has been promised for quite a while. Originally, this was simply a port to HTML5 after the announcement that Flash would be discontinued. Under the previous ownership, it was changed to be a successor called Everybody Edits Universe (EEU). However, in February 2021, Satanya announced that EEU would be discontinued in favour of starting fresh after it was decided that it would be easier to restart than to attempt to use the code from EEU. You can read more about why this decision was made here: https://forums.everybodyedits.com/viewtopic.php?id=47408.
The new game is going to be called Everybody Edits! (EE!) and is currently in development. A key advantage of the new team is that Satanya brings financial backing to the project and the new staff who worked on the game were/are paid professionals – rather than passionate volunteers as had been the case previously.
After this, progress on the new game was going well. However, one significant change that was made is that we decided to switch from vector graphics, as seen in EEU, back to pixel art – which we felt was more faithful to the original game. You can read about the details of this here: https://forums.everybodyedits.com/viewtopic.php?id=47523.
At this point, the development of Everybody Edits! had managed to escape the impact of Covid-19. However, after April, our team became increasingly impacted by this and progress began to slow down.
Despite progress being slower, development was still coming along at a healthy pace. However, this came to an end as tensions between Ukraine and Russia grew and war broke out. As explained in this post: https://forums.everybodyedits.com/viewtopic.php?id=47726, a significant proportion of our team were from Ukraine or Russia. This essentially brought development to a halt with only very little progress being made here and there. We did not feel it was fair to immediately look for new talent as we wanted to give everyone a fair chance to return to their jobs if they wanted/were able to. Unfortunately and understandably, none of our team who were living in Ukraine or Russia has been able to return to the project.
After all of this, there are 2 reasons why we have decided to shut down this blog. First of all, we hadn’t been posting to it anyway. The blog got neglected when our new team took over and we’re now at a point where we don’t have much news to share, besides bad news. We are currently looking for new programmers and artists but this will not be a quick process- though we are hopeful things will improve in 2023. The second reason is that we have decided that we want to remain silent about the game completely until the game is ready for marketing and is near release. This may not be for quite a while.
If you would like more information about why we have chosen to go silent about development progress then you can read about that here: https://forums.everybodyedits.com/viewtopic.php?id=47883.
In the meantime, we would like to thank everyone who has ever enjoyed Everybody Edits or is patiently waiting for the new game. We know that EE has a special place in the hearts of many people and we are hoping that EE!, once released, will be worthy of sharing a name with the original in the eyes of as many people as possible.
If you would like to be notified when the new game is near to release, I would recommend joining the official EE! Discord server: https://discord.gg/2kZYX6bFZq. As part of our decision to be silent until the game is near release, this server has been switched to read-only. However, if you tuck the server away at the bottom of your list of servers and turn notifications on, then we will be sure to send out an @everyone ping as soon as we are ready to come back and hype everyone up for the game again!
But until then, please remain patient and respectful to everyone, and we hope to see you in Everybody Edits!
The Everybody Edits Blog 