Welcome to the latest edition of Toontown's Backstage Column. This is the first of a three part series of Backstage posts about some of the exciting things coming in the future to Toontown Rewritten, part of our week-long celebration of Toontown's 15th Birthday!

Today we're talking about something very near and dear to our hearts, and the very core of what makes Toontown so awesome. We're talking about YOU! Hop on the Backstage Train and come along with us as we explain the new things coming for Community, Content, and Cast Members!

Our Grand Goal

The most important aspect of Toontown, and the whole reason that Toontown Rewritten exists, comes from one word: Community.

When we started Toontown Rewritten, we expected that maybe a few hundred people would sign up to play... And boy, did we underestimate. Almost five years later with nearly 1,600,000 registered players -- it's clear that Toontown's community has grown larger than we ever expected!

Players have formed large community-led Forum websites, Discord servers, in-game clans, reddit communities, and so much more! The amount of support that YOU have given for Toontown is overwhelming, and it's made us ask ourselves an important question:

"How do we help our players make their communities stronger?"

Community-Boosting Content

The first way that we've worked on to enhance the Toontown community is working on content that leaves a strong impact on groups of players. We've been experimenting with this for a while, but the most notable example comes from April's Silly Particle Scavenger Hunt.

We asked you Toons to do something crazy -- collect 2,600,000 Silly Particles in random locations of the game. Many thought it was crazy, and that the goal would take an entire month! Very quickly, however, the Toontown community banded together and started forming exactly the kind of bond that we hoped the event would create. In just a few days, all of the particles had been collected and we witnessed many friends forged from just a small community-centered event.

The Silly Particle Scavenger Hunt is just one example of our community content experiments, and now it's time to take it a step further. Check back for tomorrow's Backstage post to hear about a brand new major update coming soon to Toontown. (Psssst: It's not a one-time event!)

Cast Members: New and Improved!

Have you ever seen a Toontown Cast Member? You may better know them as a Toon Trooper or Resistance Ranger. Cast Members are representatives from the Toontown Team with fancy yellow, green, or blue icons who pop up every now and then in the game!

Cast Member events are always a blast, but we started asking ourselves: How can they be better? Can we use Cast Members to form stronger relationships with other Toontown players?

Coming soon, you'll be seeing Toontown Cast Members in game much more often with brand new abilities to interact with players. We've even been experimenting with the idea of Cast Member minigames, bringing brand new activities to pass the time in playgrounds!

Supporting Content Creators

This is a big one: Toontown has tons of content creators. Between fan art, videos, livestreams, and more -- Toontown is one bustling hub of content! We receive hundreds of letters per year with all sorts of letters and artwork in it, some of which you may have seen on our Snapchat and Instagram Stories for a new "Fanart Friday" activity that we've been doing!

Fanart Friday is just scraping the surface of the potential, however. We've been talking to content creators for feedback and working behind the scenes on several projects that we hope will give our players a bunch of support to keep making awesome stuff. In the future you might just see Fanart featured in-game, Twitch Drop integration, or even an official forum!

The first of these projects is coming with our new official Twitch Channel, which we'll be using for events like the first ever Toontown Team Livestream on Saturday at 1:00 PM Toontown Time (PST)!

We're still experimenting and developing these ideas, and that's why we're telling you about them now -- we want YOUR feedback! What kind of ways would you like to see Toontown support content creators?

Toons of the World, UNITE!

This Backstage post may not have been the most exciting to some of you, but we hope that those of you who have forged strong friendships and love for the Toontown Community will see the value of this massive push for community strength! You guys are what makes this game great -- not the Toontown Team -- and we hope that these features will help make the game greater.

It's going to take time to roll out all of the features we've talked about today, and to do it, we're going to need YOUR help and feedback! Let us know what you think of our plans -- and if you have any ideas for something we haven't mentioned here, we're all ears!

Check back tomorrow for our next Backstage post with even more exciting news about the future of Toontown. Toons of the World, UNITE!