Community Recap: September 2022

This is a review of community news that happened over the month of September. I’ve written a few of these in the past, and would like to make it a regular occurrence here on legendofdragoon.org. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights for September.

Community Promotions & Recognition

Following up from my post about moderator applications a few weeks ago, I’d like to announce some new moderators for us on Reddit and Discord. For the most part I’ve been moderating them alone since about 2017, and it has been mostly fine since our fandom is a peaceful one. However, it’s stills long overdue to get more support and issues have flared up on occasion.

Firstly, let’s welcome Vanilla Thunder as a junior moderator to the Discord server. They’ll be helping out in smaller doses for right now. Discord moderator applications will be staying open. Second, I’d like to welcome JIFXW2C3QTG5 (JX for short) and LuckyCat95 to the moderation team on the LoD subreddit. Congratulations, and welcome! Reddit applications are now closed.

I would also like to mention that Corey aka Monoxide is being distinguished as an outstanding member of the community. He came into the Discord server almost two years ago, setting an intention to reverse-engineer LoD’s “game engine” if you will and recompile it into a legal, custom engine that runs LoD better. What does better mean? Expanded modding capability beyond that which emulators can feasibly provide. Near-0 load times and unlimited save slots, which are now a thing. Eventually, lots of custom features like addition-swapping in the heat of battle. Even PVP via the Hero Competition. We have a really long list of things that Corey and I would like to see come about as time allows.

Things are now at the stage where this rebuilt engine is in a playable state. We started a livestream series two weeks ago to start showing it off to the fandom, and display how it’ll upgrade bit by bit over time into something fascinating. You can watch the first two episodes on our Youtube channel. Corey has been doing amazing work with this project, and as such we’re giving him the Community Contributor role on Discord. Congrats Corey!!

Events

Speaking of events, a lot of them took place over the last month! It’s the busiest spike of events we’ve had in a long time, and I expect it will continue so long as we have the volunteers or funding to sustain it.

Severed Chains Livestream

As mentioned above, Corey and I have begun livestreaming a special playthrough of Legend of Dragoon. This is the rebuilt engine which runs the game more efficiently, and will eventually surpass standard emulators and modding capabilities. We’ll be talking about this more in future posts which are specifically about that project.

Podcast

Last Thursday on the Discord server, I had the opportunity to bring BlackDeathDoom on the show to talk all about speedrunning, which is his main thing. We went over the history and evolution of speedrunning in Legend of Dragoon, how routes have changed and improved over time, and the addition of categories too. I’m still in the middle of editing the episode for download and streaming, but I hope to have that done soon. In the meantime, view our podcast page to download back-episodes or pick a streaming platform to subscribe and listen via.

Art Showcase

Our previous art event was about Dragoons! They could be canonical or fanfic, and there were some really interesting entries. We also got to see some people post their works-in-progress over on the Discord server, so we’ll definitely be keeping that channel open for future events. This post is already crammed full of information, so I’ll save the showcase for another day within the next week. Speaking of future events, the next art event begins on Thursday! Stay tuned for a post with more event details. The theme – spooky/Halloween – was teased in the podcast last week, so if you’d like to get started now feel free.

New Projects Brewing

Here and there, various community projects will be proposed. To start, while this isn’t something that began in September, I’d like to give an honorable mention to Nogard for making great headway with the Fan Dub which has really taken off in the past few months. Seven episodes in with a new one posted less than a week ago! If you want to see what a group of passionate volunteers can do to uplift LoD’s voiceovers and revamp some SFX in the process, consider watching the Fan Dub series on Youtube.

We have also had new talks about what an Abridged series might look like for Legend of Dragoon. Simply defined as “short version,” an abridged series can take on many forms: pure time-saving, comedy, et cetera. Multiple fans have stepped forward with various ideas, and one person with a bit of animating experience. We’d still need more volunteers to help realize the project, but just designing it on paper is still exciting.

Finally, I would like to tease a new feature coming to this website. It’s going to take some doing, but with any luck we’re going to see an interactive map of Endiness in the foreseeable future. I made contact with VGCartography who had been posting some custom LoD infomaps a few months ago, and they gave me some key resources on how to get started. More on this later!

Lots of cool stuff going on as usual thanks to our rad fandom! That’s all for now, yall. Take care and see you next time.