ame answers a simple question (Patreon)

okay as i mentioned a couple days ago, i'll be answering your questions over the next x amount of time, and apparently in more detail than literally anybody asked for

our first question comes from Therrien No Sharingan who writes,
I know I personally want to know how you decided to have the story progress the way it did, and how you decided which leader we'd face in which episode? Any major changes to the story that happened over the course of development?

so a lot of that is wrapped up in the original formation of this as a game (naturally). i have told this story a number of times before but i basically decided to make the game on impulse, and expected to get bored of and drop it after just a couple months. so when i was making those first two episodes I was pretty much just making it all up on the spot and drawing from the characters of the league and the world i had drawn on reborn's map before

so let's back up a little bit to talk about the map. the online league officially started as open to others via private Shoddy Battle server in febuary of 2010 and then due to some personal things it was dropped for several months. it reopened with the current version of our site in late may. probably within less than a week after opening we started picking up stragglers who popped in, decided to challenge a leader, and then stuck around. one of those lucky stragglers was Will Dodge, a name that should be easy to recognize because it was just in yesterday's post as he was helping me out with Starlight art. anyway, seven years ago he was just a fledgling artist and more of a roleplayer and since he's also a patron here i feel like he's going to cringe if he reads about this (sorry <3) but one night while i was signed out of our server he started constructing this pretty elaborate story about how the region of Reborn fell into chaos when their leader, Ame, disappeared
like i was only gone for half an evening lads, chill
but it was from then that the concept of reborn being a region at all, and of it being a post-apocalyptic-esque city was born

so that was the first week of having a public league server

the idea was expanded on and roleplayed over time and will and several others drew prospective maps of what reborn as a region might be like (with no intent of it ever becoming a game) but most of them were just on lined paper done and very shoddy so i guess eventually i was like okay i might as well do this myself and taped up a few pieces of paper and hippity hopped to it
and i was slow af and worked on it over a period of two years (this is what i did in college classes before i started making the game-- there was not one point where i ever paid full attention tbh) but eventually this mess happened:

So anyway this was about the game. Basically when I was winging the first couple episodes I was going off of the thoughts I had from when I was making this map. I remember as I was making it that I, in many ways thought about how the region would be laid out if it were a game. For instance I drew the plant damage into Jasper and Beryl imagining that those areas would be blocked off from the start, only to become accessible later. Again, I had no intention of actually making this into a thing... but there were many instances like that that I was imagining.

And: I wrote them down. On the forum. In a place that you can see with the descriptions I imagined for every single area on the map.

Go nuts. 

Again, at this point I had no intention of making this a game. Though I notice based on the post date, it took about a week for me to change my mind. Oops. 

So, as I was making the first couple episode I was probably basing heavily on these descriptions and ideas, but I was mostly just making it up. I expected to get bored and drop the project, but when I was working on the third episode (I remember it being right after the meeting with Taka) I was like
wait.
i should probably figure out where this is going lol. 

so, I made a list of all the characters I needed to include from our online league. I asked Will for a few Meteors who could become the game's villains (Team Meteor had existed only in back-channel roleplays before, unlike the leaders), and I made a list of the various dramatic events that occurred during the online league for things that I should be sure to include in the game.

Then I just had to make the pieces fit.

Sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they don't. It's because the plot was made by basically trying to tie this altogether that many of the characters' stories are disjointed from each other. The crystal keys were pretty explicitly just an elaborate plot device I used to be able to tie everyone to one unifying purpose. I also knew I needed every character to be battled at least once, but there was overlap for some type, so many of the less friendly personalities in duplicately leadered types became villains (corey, sigmund, el) where they would be fought naturally, and then the others took normal leader spots so that they'd be necessitated. With some types, like Ghost and Steel that had never had another leader, their roles in the story were cemented by the lack of a replacement available. 

Adrienn and the Fairy Type were naturally a last minute addition. Originally Radomus and Luna were going to be more or less back-to-back battles. 7th Street was an idea suggested by a forum user-- they mentioned adding a black market and I thought it was cool. I was adding street names to the city at the time and realized I accidentally skipped 7th. So I just used that. The city was originally just going to be rebuilt by my character and Victoria; adding Adrienn was great to be able to centralize that. We would've gone right from Reborn City into the desert.  ...gosh that would have been an awful development time..... 

As for changes throughout the story: I have an outline that I've more or less stuck to. That outline (especially the end piece of it) has been revised repeatedly over the years, despite still holding the same major points. Mostly it is the order of things that has changed. There was a lot of challenge in figuring out how I would restrict access to each later area so as not to overwhelm the player, and as you all know I've relied on HMs heavily for this. For a while I was even going to use the Flash HM as a necessary tool to progress, but that was replaced when I found event support for a Rock Climb HM. It will not be in this episode, but when you come to the point that you would need Rock Climb to progress, know that originally there was going to be some kind of magical cave there that would require flash to get through instead.
But that felt like a stretch so I was glad to replace it.
Also nobody needs flash this late in the game, gotdayum.
But that would have been much earlier anyway. The specifics of which leaders enable which HM has changed a lot for everything over Agate. I've felt like there was a lot to fit in. it was solidified as of Episode 13, but it changed many times before then.

The conclusion of the story has been rewritten repeatedly to make sure I get everything I need to in. It will probably continue to be. I'm not making drastic changes to the outcomes so much as I am figuring out the best way to organize the like 13,000 things that have to happen and wrap up. It is a principle of writing that the conflict should resolve as close to the end of the book as possible. To an extent, I'm applying that here. 

..whew.

Well, I was going to go through that topic I linked earlier and give my thoughts on how and why those things have changed. However, I suppose I'll save that for another day. This post has already gotten way longer than I expected. Nevertheless, hopefully that answers a question like that fully... for now. 

Oops.