This Week at the Crumb Club - March 27th, 2023

Happy Monday and Ramadan Kareem! This week at the Crumb Club, we're moving fast in more ways than one. With the completion of Dead Space Remake, we also played RE4make on stream and spent some time getting acclimatized to all the changes that have been made to its combat, pacing, and moment-to-moment gameplay. As someone who loved the OG RE4, it's been an excellent time and I can't wait to see more of this game!

Today we're going to be discussing how Sound Alerts will be changing and new improvements coming to the Breadbox and the blog in the coming weeks, including additional changes to scheduling!

But first, a TL;DR of last week:

• New & Revamped Overlays

• Overhauled Scenes

• Meme scenes added.

• Issues detailed.

• Fixes planned/implemented.

• Ramadan/travel scheduling changes.

• And a partridge in a pear- wait wrong holiday.

With all that out of the way, let's take a peek at what's coming to stream:

Will YEET for Crumbs.

Sound Alerts have been in a weird place as of late; free Sound Alerts were spread across both the extension and the channel point menu due to limited slots on the latter, which also caused some overlap between Meme Redeems as well. With Sound Alerts adding additional slots to the channel point menu, it was as good a time as ever to take advantage of the increased space to add some viewer-favourite Sound Alerts alongside Meme Redeems to fill out the pricing tiers between channel point rewards.

It was also a great opportunity to rebalance the cost of channel point rewards, mainly by lowering the cost of higher-priced rewards like "Draw on your Whiteboard", "Voice Act" and especially "Guide the Raid" to make it easier for viewers to suggest who to raid. This command's also been reworked to be first-come first-serve much like the "First!" redeem. More Sound Alerts will come to stream but will be shuffled out every so often to better improve visibility of higher-tier rewards as more will be added over time. While new meme scenes will be added, meme redeems will enter maintenance mode for the time being as more time will be spent improving upon...

Causing Discord

The BreadBox Discord server is going to be receiving some much-needed additions to properly communicate changes with Crumb Club members and to better foster a sense of community between users in the channel. Aside from posts in the plugs channel, no one really seems to be using it including yours truly and that's a shame considering how often it gets plugged on stream. So, what can you expect to see out of the Breadbox going forward?

For starters, you're going to see a more concerted effort on my part to post links in various channels and participate in the server itself. The plan is to eventually branch into things like community game/movie nights down the line to help turn the Breadbox into a hangout of sorts, especially on voice chat. You can also expect to see emotes and stickers coming to the server very soon.

A lot of the categories that used to separate channels have been removed and have now been moved to the Crumb-on Room category to make them easier to find. #🔌plugs and #🔗clips have been moved to the top of the server and in place of the #🔴live channel will be a dedicated channel for all updates to stream & the server called #📰server-news. This new channel will contain a TL;DR summary of all the updates detailed in blog posts and other news that have yet to make it into a blog post, including behind the scenes sneak peeks at new features being developed for stream. (Thank a certain Pear for that idea).

For those who have questions or suggestions for stream, the server, or the blog, there's now a help centre category with their respective channels so that Crumb Club members can help each other out and provide feedback to help improve upon the stream & server.

New Blog, who dis?

In its current incarnation, BallisticToaster.com runs on a fairly limited WordPress theme that doesn't properly display text formatting (underlined text, for instance, is practically invisible), has various text alignment issues, problems with displaying images, along with being quite slap-dash in general. For something that was put up in less than a few minutes to host the "Toasty's OBS Setup" series of posts a while ago, it's clear that a revamp is long overdue and I'm pleased to announce that such an overhaul is indeed in the works!

While more pages, categories, types of posts, and features are being added (hope you love night mode), a new theme and visual appearance will replace the current version of BallisticToaster.com and will make use of the branding guidelines put forth with the overlays detailed in last week's TWCC post. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this blog changes because a facelift has been a long time coming and I want to add more kinds of content than weekly blog posts and tutorials. My hope is that it'll do all that and then some while being more accessible and responsive for everyone.

Toasty After Hours

As hinted at during last stream, schedules are coming back newly reworked for Ramadan and the months ahead when I'm on a different time zone! Rather than attempting to stream during the daytime when I'll be fasting and without water, streams will take place after sunset at a consistent time of 11PM EST/8PM PST. Streams will also be a bit more restrained so as to not run for multiple hours at a time, aiming to finish by 2AM EST/11PM PST at the absolute latest. (We do eat another meal right before sunrise after all.) You may also see some surprise streams outside of the specified dates to clear out games from the rotation or to just have some fun with something entirely different!

Stay toasty!

-BallisticToaster