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.