Rebranding Toontown Offline

Last week, the Toontown Offline project turned a whopping four years old. That’s almost half the time Disney’s Toontown was open for! Throughout these past four years of our project, thehas been through numerous changes:Toontown Offline was originally a one-man-parade with our former developer Logano as the only developer. Throughout the years, we’ve expanded to 4, 10, and even 20 members at once. Having small and large teams both come with separate pros and cons- but we’ve managed to experience both sides of the coin.When you work on a project for up to four years, slowly you’ll get better and better at the content you produce. When Toontown Offline first launched, it wasn’t the plan to add much new, original content. However, as more talent and imagination joined our project, it was evident to put it to good use and create things no other Toontown project has before. The re-creation of Toontown’s 2003 Installer video, the Prologue, was our first large feat in creating new content. Even so, the Prologue has since been expanded upon and revised many times since it’s release. As we continue to sharpen up our skills, and for as long as the community still enjoys it, we will continue to produce unique content for our game.So, what exactly is the future for Toontown Offline? This time last year, we visually rebranded the project with a new title screen, loading screens, theme song, and more. After much reflection, deliberation, and planning, the Toontown Offline team has decided to enter our biggest overhaul yet.Starting today, Toontown Offline is headed in a new direction. Over the next few months, our game is going to undergo a plethora of changes that will ultimately be for the better. In this mega-post, we will be outlining most of what’s to come for the future of Toontown Offline. You will understand the changes we are making, the motivation for these changes, and even more. To start, we’ll outline possibly the largest feat we’ve created for ourselves. We intend to completely ditch Toontown Rewritten’s 2014 source code, and move every single unique feature of ours over to a vanilla Toontown Online source.In 2014 when Toontown Rewritten was still in closed beta, the source code to their game was unfortunately leaked in a malicious fashion. Many Toontown projects, including our own, jumped on that 2014 source code and began making their own games based off of this easy-to-use code. Toontown Offline began using this code because our original intentions were to be an Offline variation of Toontown Rewritten. As the years have went by, we instead kept to this code-base because ambitions of using something else could not be met. Our team simply wasn’t as skilled as we are today.Four years later and Toontown Offline is going strong- but we think we can be even stronger by switching to our own code-base. The process of moving to our own code-base has already begun, and is certainly not an easy task. Despite the workload that comes with our newfound goals, we feel it will help the project for the better. The process we’re going under to change our code-base is different from what you may think. Rather than remove elements of Toontown Rewritten, we’re simply porting over the unique features of Toontown Offline. That being said, our plan is to ditch any and all aspects of Rewritten’s other content- particularly The Elections & Toonfest.Over the years we’ve taken a lot of content and inspiration from Toontown Rewritten, and put it into our game. Now, we are choosing to rid of their content big and small. From accessories to the Toonfest playground, we will not be including it in the new version of Toontown Offline. Episodes, too, are subject to receive some changes as they contain elements of the Rewritten storyline. Probably the most important change, however, is renaming a certain update of ours…“Operation: Duck Hunt” is the name of an update we have been working on for three years now. Despite what you may think, this name actually originated from an update Toontown Rewritten themselves had planned. The idea for their Duck Hunt is similar to ours, in which the Toons would team up, defeat a Boss Battle, and save Slappy from the Cogs. In conjunction with the other efforts we are making, we will be renaming and changing some aspects of our update. Slappy and other Rewritten references will be permanently removed from our game and “Duck Hunt” while we shift the focus towards a captured duck we know and love, Scrooge McDuck. If you fear this update will be delayed once more due to these changes- not to worry! There will be very minimal tweaks required in order to fulfill the removal of Slappy, and focus on Scrooge.Now, as we move forward from “Operation: Duck Hunt”, we would like to share the new name of this update with you. How does, “Operation: Seek Out Scrooge” sound? SOS! SOS! Scrooge McDuck needs your help soon! We hope everyone will soon grow fond of the new name. Seek Out Scrooge isn’t the only rename coming with our massive changes, however. Due to the massive update this is, we will be overhauling the versioning system of our updates.With the release of this update, we will be reverting our game back to version 1.0.0.0, and from there on out we will follow the Toontown Online versioning system. We feel this is the best approach, because had we continued the current one, we would reach 3.0, and even 4.0 with relative ease. Those versions would’ve been a bit over the top and not reflective of the actual state of our game. In addition, rolling back to 1.0.0.0 allows the update to represent a “reset” for our game. We will be using an entirely new code-base among making the multitude of other changes described in this post.Now, when exactly is this massive update set to come out? Will I be able to play my old Toons on this new version? What Episodes are exactly changing? Help!We understand there will be many questions about what we’re doing with these changes. Here is a small FAQ for any questions we may have left unanswered so far.We don’t know. It will most likely take a month or two in order to fulfill our plans, but don’t hold us to that. This will be a lengthy process, but our goal at the bare minimum is to release the update before 2019. We feel this is very easily done, and our plan is to post updates as we reach milestones.No. We apologize for the inconvenience, but all players will have to start with a new database when the new version of our game releases. Fortunately, not many players play our game in a legitimate fashion. Hopefully this won’t be too much of a setback, but it is necessary for what we’re doing.Not too many. The Elections, of course, will not be present at all. This includes characters such as Slappy, Alec Tinn, and an enlarged importance on Doctor Surlee. Characters that were involved in the Toontown Online storyline will continue to exist, such as Scrooge McDuck, Gyro Gearloose, and others. We will be making small tweaks to the Prologue in order to reflect changes. Gyro’s Tale, however, will be completely redone as a brand new Episode.Eventually.Soon.Feel free to join our Discord where we put lots of updates and teasers to our game! Click the Discord icon at the top right of our website.Finally, we thank you for reading this lengthy post. This is perhaps the most important post we have ever had to make. All of our changes are ultimately for the better, and hopefully all the changes will be digested in due time. As state previously, come on in our Discord and ask any questions you may have regarding this post. Thank you for sticking with Toontown Offline for four years. Look forward to what we’re working on, and have a good day!