This blog post is a mirror of a blog post in the TootTally Patreon.
Hello tooters and boners!
It's been a while since we've posted one of these, and for that I deeply apologize. There has been a lot on our plate the past year, and I personally haven't had the time to just sit down and write this entire blog post. But now that I do have the time, I think it's quite apt for me to try to simplify and see what's happened the past year in TootTally.
Multiplayer
This year we've released multiplayer to everyone, and it's been a smashing success! We've been able to utilize multiplayer for TTCC 2024, and there's been some updates very recently to allow for team play and allowing players to freely choose what game modifiers they'd like to play with.
There are plans to further expand multiplayer to be more competitive by allowing duels, and to be more friendly by having always-on lobbies that stay at a somewhat consistent difficulty so people are encouraged to play on-lobby. These are still plans though, and will take some time to implement.
Events
This past year, we've tried our hand at making competitive tromboning a thing. I'd say we've been successful at that.
TTCC 2024 has been a massive undertaking, taking several months to plan and prepare for, and another month to execute. It is easily the largest event that I'd ever planned, and I am so glad that it's turned out so well. Thank you to everyone in the planning server who's made the charts, banners, badges, stream assets, and everything else. I genuinely could not do this without all of you.
Special shoutouts for:
- bw242 for helping me manage the tournament planning
- silvernauts for being the main chart QA and caster
- DerpyChap for helping us record replays for the showcases by making a fork of the leaderboard mod
- ZaraNyaa for being our streamer and lobby organizer during playoffs
- TheWhiteShadow for helping us integrate lobby information into a stream overlay
- PX for pretty much all our assets
- Space Kidd for the competitor portraits (seriously those were amazing, thank you so much for those)
- All the players who've taken the time to learn and master the charts we've put out
- All the people who have donated to the prize pool. That prize pool is nuts.
Patreon
Thank you to everyone who's kept on supporting us on Patreon. You make it possible for us to exist as we are now, and to keep working on new features to make your tromboning experience as smooth (or as competitive) as possible!
For the sake of transparency, here is our monthly donations from all of you fine folk.
Server Costs
This year we've seen the highest number of concurrent daily players on TootTally. This hasn't affected us much in terms of cost.
The main driver for costs now comes from two sources: general server infrastructure costs and CloudFlare. Since May, we've been using CloudFlare to help us serve TootTally across the web. We've seen lesser problems with replay uploads since our move to CloudFlare, and we've been using CloudFlare's R2 service to more efficiently serve chart downloads.
For transparency, here is our CloudFlare costs for the past year:
There has been a spike in costs during September as we've accidentally used CloudFlare caching to serve charts. This has been rectified since.
In terms of server infrastructure, here's our costs the past year:
The Future
Well, who knows what the future may bring for TootTally. There's a VR version of the game coming out real soon (sometime by the end of this month, most likely). There's also plans from Holy Wow to add Steam workshop support, and an in-game track editor (which is currently in beta). We'll be planning on supporting all of these (especially the Steam Workshop), but it may take time to adopt depending on the complexity of these new features (and an entirely new game).
There's also events from the community sprouting up, like Maddy's Sleeby Shakeup Showdown [main sheet link], a 2v2 double-elimination Trombone Champ tournament that's open for all players (signups have closed for about a week since this post, sadly, but please do watch the streams!). I personally hope to see more events happening in this community as we grow and expand.
If you have an event that you'd like to organize and need some help in setting some things up, please don't hesitate to ask us for help, advice, or general support!
Thank you to everyone who's supported us all this way. I cannot thank you enough from the bottom of my heart. Thank you to Holy Wow as well for being gracious hosts to us in the community and for making a fun game for all of us to enjoy.
-gristCollector
P.S. EZ mode score recalculation happening right now as of posting this. EZ gameplay modifier should now be rated.
Context For Those Who Are Curious
Hey there, stranger! This bit isn't in the Patreon post as I feel like people who can randomly come across this post might need some context on what we are and what we do.
TootTally can be a few things: for one, we are the community-created and run leaderboard service for Trombone Champ. We handle automatically rating the difficulties of custom charts, taking replays, and ranking them accordingly. We also handle adding game-altering mods that change up how a chart is played, among other things.
Starting last year, we've made a few posts that show our patrons on Patreon where their contributions were going towards, and where our future plans lie
