This is livvy94, music director for the EarthBound Beginnings Remake hack, and now, suddenly, community manager!
It's been an exciting and slightly terrifying week. SupremeKirb, team member, coder extrordinaire, and creator
of EBME, edited together a quick trailer for this year's F3 fangame showcase. The audio was swapped out (without
us knowing) due to Kaze getting a copyright strike on my arrangement of All That I Needed (Was You). Gabbi released
the trailer with the proper audio soon after on her YouTube channel, and the support was overwhelming. We've
gotten so many comments, and the project has been talked about on
GoNintendo,
Time Extension,
and even Kotaku.
It's extremely humbling.
In the prior weeks, I've been hard at work coding this site in raw HTML, with very minimal CSS. I'm a big fan of
Neocities and the freedom/customization that goes into making personal websites,
so this has been fun to experiment with. Gabbi and I have based the site's design on Nintendo's website from 1997,
as seen here!
And now, we have a lot more eyes on not only the project, but this site, the FAQ I wrote,
and this Newsroom page, which formerly just had placeholder text. So, I think
this would be a good place to post diary-like updates. I think this is a good idea not only because it's generally
smart to post regular updates, but also because I think this will be nostalgic to look back on in the future.
Yesterday, I uploaded a new version of the Poltergeist theme - now with a freshly-recorded electric guitar instrument that
doesn't evoke funny skeletons.
I've been re-uploading a lot of the songs on the soundtrack
to my YouTube channel, mostly to get rid of videos
with my old name, or with subpar mixing due to how I recorded the songs at the time. In 2013 and 2014, I used to either record straight
from EBMusEd, or an SPC visualizer I ran in DOSBox... As always, I'm linking to the old uploads and comment sections for
posterity, now unlisted.
Gabbi also posted an update on her YouTube channel's community tab. Here's the text of that:
I honestly didn't expect the project to get this much attention. We are working on one last trailer that has a lot of
surprises in it for the next MOTHER Direct (hosted by a different team from NOKOGODO).
The specific date of when this hack drops has been revealed on our neocities site's FAQ page -- 6/14/2026.
11 months, I know... that's kind of a long wait, and I feel bad because that's basically a year, but there's also a chance
we'll just release it early. Could be much sooner than this date, but I really want to make sure we take care of as many bugs
as possible. Once everything seems ready for release, I'll make an announcement video and links in the description of where you
can download the patch file. We also have a bluesky page.
If any of you are worried about this being another "Winter 2014" scenario, I can reassure you that this project will come out
no matter what. My latest livestream vod features me playing through
the hack - from the poltergeist all the way until the end credits - and occasionally fixing bugs.
There, you can judge for yourself how close this is to actually releasing.
Thank you for all the kind words, and your patience. There have been a lot of comments from people who've truly been in it for
the long haul - people who learned about the project all the way back in 2007. Hearing these stories means a lot to everyone on
the team.
Here's what the team is working on right now!
- Movement scripting: coffins shaking
- Movement scripting: you rescue Pippi, you both walk to the door, and she faces you
- Movement scripting: Edge case where if you walk past the Healer in the Mt. Itoi cabin, he walks up to you and says this, and gives you a free heal
- Trying to implement the items invented by the weird teacher who lives in the school, and his shop menu
- Taking into account edge cases in the Live House scene like Ninten being alone, and various combinations of characters being petrified or dead
- Green pixels on the tables in the Live House after the palette transition (this bug is visible in the F3 trailer... oops)
That's all for this update! See you in the next one!
-- Olivia