The 14 Finish Line!

And we made it! Episode 14 is officially live for public download as of last night!

A lot of things have contributed to delaying this episode. For the curious, aside from personally holding down part time school and part-to-full time work, we had a lot of the episode done off the get-go. But large amounts of time were lost specifically when we found out Essentials v14 was coming into existence. We had to wait for a stable version (well…. stable-r than its release day), manually readd all the scripts, manually fix all the scripts that had been newly broken, find out that even after gluing everything together the AI was a total shipwreck, playtest the entire game again to get all cases of it possible, and after that during the beta, the eggs and shiny sprites took significantly more time than I would have liked. Siiiiigh! So there’s that.

But while this ‘story of the delays behind 14’ is unique to this development period, the sad truth is that things are always going to come up. I already have a laundry list of things that are going to make E15 take a while even though it is a relatively short episode. For instance, ORAS updates and new mega sprites especially will be a big one, followed by some more city restructuring (a la 9.5) to reduce lag (which, incidentally, consists mainly of undoing everything that was done in 9.5… oops…). That said, I hope everyone is content to stick around for the months behind episodes as we wind up to our grand finale.

3rd Gen Shiny Showcase

As anyone who’s read the Readme over the past couple episodes will know… so… no one at all… We’re currently revamping the shiny sprites to be a bit more special. Since the shiny rate is much higher in Reborn compared to the main series, we wanted to do something to make finding Reborn shinies a little more interesting.

As it is, canon shiny Pokemon are occasionally awesome, but on the whole nowhere near awesome enough for people to adore, especially considering that most of them are just a tint change, or some bizarre color scheme that generally looks even worse than the original. That’s no fun. We saw room to make an improvement and add a little bit of fun to shiny hunting in Reborn, especially since some shinies occasionally become really cool… or just thematically bizarre in their own right (Shiny Scatterbug might be an interesting investment…)

In each episode, another generation of shinies is updated to Reborn standards. With first, second, and sixth already done, E14 brings in the third generation for a fresh coat paint. I’ve picked out some of my favorites of the lot for a sort of preview of what we’re packing, and some things you might be interested in trying to pick up.

We are not far away now, boys, girls, and everyone else…

Game Over- Battle for the Net

We’re going to talk a bit about Net Neutrality today.

While it’s great to have a game to download and play off-line, we mustn’t take for granted its dependency on its source. Let’s ignore the ‘download’ part of the equation. The tools to create Pokemon Reborn, the Reborn League it’s based off of, the simulator it was run on, and the friendships that sparked the Reborn community in the first place all would not exist without free internet. For the sake of Reborn and virtually every other indie game, internet community, online game, or personal website out there, we need to protect the net.

But too often, this ever-vital cause falls by the wayside. We need to continue to call action to the current events threatening the free internet. Check out the video below to see exactly what I mean, and just how easily we can miss it.

Let’s not rush to the Game Over just yet– the battle for the net is just beginning.

Ame’s Eggcellent Adventure

Allow me to begin by saying: God bless the generous user who took the time to create and individualized egg sprite for every Pokemon. I don’t know with what sorcery they got the job done so fast and so well– and he really did do an excellent job on the whole– but the egg hatching/finding etc feels so much better with it. Thank you so much for that, kind user,

However.

We need to talk about some of these eggs.

I think there has been a fundamental misunderstanding about how exactly eggs work in the Pokemon world. And granted we are dealing with magical creatures with super-powers who may as well be fully grown from the moment they hatch. But we have some problems.

Allow me to share some of them.

You will recognize this as a Starly egg. You will particularly recognize it because it basically has Starly’s face, except for the eyes. Now, may I just ask:

Why?

Why does the egg have a face? Like… To me, this suggests that this poor Starly is already mostly developed and has somehow been squeezed into this egg and it’s face is being pressed up against the outside so tightly that the very shape and colour of its face has been imprinted onto the shell.

help me

To me this is not only mildly concerning, but down-right terrifying. Like, does this mean that all Pokemon are just trapped, compressed into some shell until enough time finally passes that it can free the Pokemon? No, thank you…

Of course, not all Pokemon make out so poorly. Take Clamperl for instance:

(◡‿◡✿)

(ʘ‿ʘ✿) what the fuck you say about me you little bitch? hold my flower

✿＼(｡-_-｡) “Kick his ass, baby. I am yo flower.

Let’s also consider this gem:

Because… I’m sorry, is that a half-hatched egg Pokemon unhatched egg with a half-hatched egg Pokemon pattern? Excuse me? What is the point of the Pokemon being half-hatched if the egg itself has an a half-hatched pattern to begin with even when not yet hatched? Aaaaaaaaaaa!

Jokes aside, the current state of eggly affairs is somewhat silly, and somewhat creepy, if not at other times tragic. Feebas-egg is very sad too:

actual very sad no good terribly tragic feebas egg

As such, eggs are getting a fresher coat of paint before Episode 14, to make them a little more egg-like and a little less, well, nightmare fuel.

As for the new episode itself, it won’t be too long now before we’re shelling that out.

“I Wish This Episode Were Longer”

Every episode, I get a number of complaints that ‘the episode seemed really short’… even when comparing the amount of content between them, that really is pretty far from the case. In fact, episodes in general follow a pattern of two areas to visit/explore/fight through, and then a gym. And sure, some episodes are shorter, or longer, than others. But even the longer episodes get called short quite a bit.

Let’s talk about the perception of time.

A lot of people say they feel like time flies as they get older– is that true? Maybe time is really speeding up?

You’re a ripe one years old, and you’ve by some miracle already developed full consciousness and an understanding of the concept of time. You reflect on the past year of your life, it being all of your life, and you note that, wow, you had some experiences. Crazy.

A year passes. You’re two now and in another sudden moment of clarity you think about your past year again– it doesn’t seem quite so long as the first one did. Lots of things happen, but it just feels like it went by faster in retrospect.

And you observe the same thing when you’re three, and four, and so on. Every year seems to have blown by so quickly, and every next year is quicker still.

In short, this is just because of your perception of your whole experience of time. When you’re one years old, the past year is 100% of your life. When you’re two, a year is only 50%– well, of course it’s going to seem smaller in comparison. At three years of age, a year is just 33%, and by the time you’re twenty five, every year is a whopping 4% of your experience. When you look at it backwards like that, of course those recent years are going to appear shorter, or quicker, compared to the smaller experience you had when you were younger.

So what does this have to do with Reborn?

It’s the same principle as the perception of time. Episode 1 is 100% of the game. By Episode 10, each new release is only 10% of the existing game. When you compare the new content (now 1/14th of the entire game!) to your perception of the old whole, obviously the new part is going to feel short.

So, please, I promise you, the episode is exactly as long as it needs to be. ❤

~ Ame

On Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is a big issue for the world in general, but what many people around here don’t realize is how destructive its loss could be to Reborn. We hosted a campaign against this a couple months ago, but imagine if you will, a world where it takes ten minutes to load a page on this site, and six hours to download our small game. It would be extremely difficult for our community to thrive under such conditions, but unfortunately, something like this may come to pass.

As part of an upcoming piece I’ll be doing regarding net neutrality, I’ve taken the liberty of conducting some video surveys about how people around Reborn typically use the internet, and what they knew about Net Neutrality. Below you’ll see some of the responses, to be compiled into a more polished video forth-coming.

This issue affects all of us, and it’s not going to go away unless we make it.

Is Episode 14 out yet?

Fun fact: We have a development Skype we use for all things Reborn-dev related, including but not limited to keeping a running tally of how many times people ask when the new episode will be out.

We’re watching you guys.

Incidentally, the actual process of creating an episode does not take all that long. Making new graphics > Making new maps > Adding events/battles to those maps should only take about three weeks tops. Why, then, does it seem like every episode takes 2-3 months to come out?

Let’s take a look at the current 13-14 development period as an example. A lot of the maps were done ahead of time (looking at you, greater Ametrine area), but we still had the mountain peak to make. Doing the graphics and mapping for that area took about two weeks, and that was a fairly ideal pace. And then the delays began.

The most notable thing for this development period has been the release of Essentials v14. Essentials, for those who don’t know, is the script set on which Reborn is based. Thus, an update like this is pretty significant, and all the more so because it’s the first one in nearly a year.

Now, I’ve dealt with Essentials updates in the past. Strictly speaking, it would not be a big deal at all, except for the fact that the ‘proper’ update process completely erases all of our script changes. This means any battle system fixes, all field effects, and any system/feature changes were entirely reverted. That hurts. We’re not unprepared; we’ve very carefully documented all of our modifications in preparation for this very event, but it still takes a while to go back and put each and every change back into the script manually. Even longer when we realize that the entire script structure for the battle system was changed and so half of our updates need to be partially rewritten for it. That, in tandem with the drastically increased volume of updates we’ve made since the last Essentials update made this a very painful, very tedious update process– the worst we’ve dealt with. But we’re over it. We’re done. We got through it.

Or so we thought.

Between a year’s worth of changes being thrown at us, a years worth of our changes being thrown at those and the two not necessarily playing nice together, pretty much everything is broken. We did some tests as we were merging to make sure the battle system was still in tact (and trust me, for a while, it was not) but… after looking more closely, unfortunately the whole game is pretty much going to need to be tested again.

So I’m currently running a pre-alpha test to catalogue everything that’s newly broken, and in turn, fix it. But this is going to take some time, given the length of the game, and, perhaps more importantly, given the volume of things that no longer work.

As a testament to this, in the very first battle of the game, vs Cain’s Nidoran, we found that Cain had ceased functioning and seemed unable to give an order to his Pokemon. I eventually began to suspect, after playing around a bit, that something was wrong with the Cain trainer himself. I tested two other Cain battles to be sure, and indeed, Cain did nothing in either of those battles either, whatsoever.

Actual Episode 14 footage

You might, based on that, think it is reasonable to assume that Cain, like I suspected, was somehow himself broken. NOPE. It turned out that the three Cain battles I tested just happened to be broken all for different reasons each. That said, I invite any of you familiar with the principles of statistics, to take what you know about random sampling and imagine based on this scenario exactly how smoothly the rest of this pre-alpha test is going.

In short, Episode 14 will be coming… but I have to make sure that it actually functions first. Thanks, everyone, for your continued patience as I personally wrestle with this gallimaufry of code.

On the plus side, I have a super cute Chespin.

On Ari, Decibel and the necessity of Representation

Today two new protagonists for Reborn were announced. If you’re on this blog you’ve probably seen Ari and Decibel already, but in case you haven’t:

Ari

Decibel

Ari and Decibel enter as the long-ago asked-for non-binary protagonists for the game, but it kind of took a while to get them into the mix. The video below has a brief explanation of why, along with a spriting demonstration for Ari’s mugshot graphic.

There’s going to be some wise guy out there though, who makes a remark like,

But, Ame, why bother with a canon non binary PoC character? Almost no one is going to play xem!

Well listen here, Mr. Wise Guy. That’s the thing about representation. There are non-binary players out there who are forced into a rather uncomfortable situation every time a game chooses to ask them between being a Boy or a Girl. It’s not the end of the world, but they notice it, and something like that can ruin someone’s day. Now, this isn’t going to fix the problem of the gender dichotomy, but it does make sense for a game that already has a canon non-binary character to make playable options as well.

That is, we’ve already acknowledged that group of people. Now, even if almost nobody plays it, is it okay to say, “We know this would be cool for you, but we don’t acknowledge you as being worthy of having a protagonist role you can identify with.”?

It doesn’t matter how many or how few people play the thing. The point is that we’ve provided as an option that is on equal footing with all other players. That’s the necessity of representation.

Character Previewing

It’s hardly a secret around the community that our Characters page is a little bit outdated in terms of content. I’ve let it linger in its limbo’d state for the past few episodes out of indecisiveness, but it’s time to do something about that.

In the beginning, Pokemon Reborn originated as a community game, and as a project oriented specifically towards our community there were lots of internal references and a wide array of information that was meant to be universally understood going in. To my surprise, the game’s popularity rapidly inflated far beyond our own borders, so something like the Character page was necessary to get incoming players up to speed. However, as the game grew even further, the project goal shifted from a community game to a more universal appeal. This meant that there should no longer have been a need for a character catalog- the game itself needs to be the one to introduce these characters; not a website.

“I might wish you ‘Good luck,’ however ‘luck’ is merely an illusory essentialization of statistics, and is not inherently good or bad in any way.”

I was originally going to dispose of the Character page entirely, but a few users tipped me off that it had still been valuable to them in encouraging to try the game out in the first place. Well, I thought, that’s certainly worth the trouble. Therefore, the Character’s page is going to have a new purpose: as a second teaser.

It’ll still need to be redone, of course, and that’s where your feedback comes in. We have some options, listed in the poll below, about exactly what is going to be included on the new character’s page. For consistency, a Minimum approach makes the most sense, but a Moderate approach might give a fuller view of what (rather, who) the early game holds. Finally, we have an option to reorganize the current page hosting all existing characters. While this is messy, other options might not include more popular personalities like Radomus or Terra.

So tell me, which of these three layouts would best encourage you as a potential player of the game to give it a try?