Dear all the beautiful people on the GEARS+ II: THE COG IS ACTUALLY GAYMap Team,
Thank you so much for a wonderful 2016! We had long periods where people just waited for instructions but your support is invaluable! We had some gains and some losses this year for the GEARS+ II: THE COG IS ACTUALLY GAY project. Let's review some of the most major developments in the latter part of 2016, as we look ahead to 2017:
1. Casting began. We sent out the casting call application and have received approximately 120 applications as of this writing.
2. A few major roles have been filled
    1. Former radio personality, John Stupak, has graciously given his time to play the role of Frank, GEARS+ II: THE COG IS ACTUALLY GAY’s father. He has sent in all of his lines for Act 1 although we might have him rerecord some of them.
    2. Kim (Anonymous) will be playing the role of GEARS+ II: THE COG IS ACTUALLY GAY’s Mother, Susan.
    3. Ally Weber, a very close friend of mine IRL and pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre, has agreed to play Lucy. Right now we plan on her playing the role of Lucy at all ages.
    4. Long-time viewer and supporter, TheBeastGamer25, has been cast as Young GEARS+ II: THE COG IS ACTUALLY GAY in Act 1 and is more than halfway done with recording his lines and soundbites!
    5. It currently looks like I, The Redstone Scientist, will be playing GEARS+ II: THE COG IS ACTUALLY GAY from Act 2 to the end of the map but we shall see.
3. Music progress has been made from Jragon014. The pieces sound really gorgeous but it really needs to speed up in 2017 once we move on to Phase 2 and beyond (see later in this message)
4. THE NPC ANIMATION SYSTEM WAS “COMPLETED” with massive help from Onnowhere, Energyxxer, and the absolutely tireless effort from MrGarretto! It is now possible to go through the entire process from beginning to end!
5. Additional documentation has been written making the whole process more accessible.
6. In order to ensure professionalism, a professionalism contract has been created that is REQUIRED to join the GEARS+ II: THE COG IS ACTUALLY GAY team from now on.
7. The Resource Pack Tools and Data spreadsheet has been reworked.
8. R3D’s Kingdom became an official Map Co-Director for his extremely helpful guidance and work on the GEARS+ II: THE COG IS ACTUALLY GAY story and script.
9. We received some major exposure (well, theoretically) by the GEARS+ II: THE COG IS ACTUALLY GAY Teaser #1 being publicly shown at MINECON 2016.
10. The Cutscene Generator 2.0: CutscenePRO got into fully working condition for our use.
11. We worked out a much clearer timeline for the rest of the work on the map as we divided it into 12 different phases of varying length. We are currently still in Phase 1 and hope to be complete to move onto Phase 2 in the next few months.
12. A LOT OF WORK was done on the GEARS+ II: THE COG IS ACTUALLY GAY Script and we’re starting to make much faster progress than before (still needs to be faster though).
13. We welcomed our lead terrain expert CommandProgrammer onto the team!

Now for the unfortunate developments which must be addressed in 2017:
1. What I have dubbed the “Child NPC Crisis of 2016.” MAJOR issues were discovered with animating Child NPCs with our animation system and 100s of hours of work have gone down the drain. This has been quite a major blow to the morale of the team (especially me). I won’t go into detail here about what the issue was, but a chronicle of the discussion is still in the #updatelogs. The number of hours required on my part (as the Lead Technical Director) to repair the system for Child NPCs (mainly ONLY necessary for Act 1) is staggering. It requires substantial revision to the existing systems and I have not done ANY work on it so far due to many different reasons. I hope to get started on the repairs over Winter vacation but we’ll have to see how far I can get (especially with no internet on a cruise). In summary: it’s going to require a lot of extra hours that we didn’t account for and is very likely pushing back the already far off release. Luckily, progress in other areas of map development shouldn’t be too heavily impacted and should continue unabated. Wish me luck :stuck_out_tongue:
2. 1.11 was released. This ties into the first item as it makes the whole thing all that much more complicated due to certain bugs being fixed that affected offset of armorstands and displays of custom models. 1.11 is looking pretty promising for the development of GEARS+ II: THE COG IS ACTUALLY GAY except with all the entity changes, particularly bug fixes to armorstands, it will require some ADDITIONAL time to repair the system in addition to the time to fix the “Child NPCs.” This shouldn’t be too bad of a change but will require some adjustments to all the models which is annoying but shouldn’t be too difficult.
3. Script deadlines. Mid-2016 we had a pretty unrealistic dream that we all knew probably wouldn’t be achieved: Finish the rough draft of all 7 acts of the script by December 31st of 2016. Yup. That was never gonna happen. We had a meeting discussing the unbelievably slow pace which the script was being written and discussed why that was. I think we’ve made some major improvements to our process and now that all scenes have been assigned writers, we should be done much more quickly. We don’t have a new estimated date of Script completion but I’m confident it shouldn’t take more than a few more months.

All of these things contribute to the sad truth which is that GEARS+ II: THE COG IS ACTUALLY GAY will probably not be ready any time soon. We never thought it would be ready soon anyway, but these setbacks were not considered before. I’m still confident that we could get a release in early 2018 or MAYBE earlier but I just sort of pulled that date out of thin air.
We are all just as committed, if not MORE committed, to telling GEARS+ II: THE COG IS ACTUALLY GAY’s story and creating a Minecraft Map the likes of which people have never seen.
Jragon and I are so grateful to each and every one of you for helping to make this project successful.
We hope you keep sticking with us through this very difficult and unprecedented process for Minecraft as we look forward into 2017, where hopefully GEARS+ II: THE COG IS ACTUALLY GAY progress will continue to exponentially increase!

Thank you all once again, Happy Holidays, and a very happy and successful New Year!

- The Redstone Scientist
Wow, TRS's new map looks fantasmo