ITT Ame pretends she knows what she's doing ever (Patreon)

low budget post this morning because the list of things i feel like doing is about 0 items long. let's go back to our unanswered questions from before. 

Dragonmaster百十六 writes:

Regarding the exploration factor of this new episode, have you considered ways to make caves visible at night? I notice din the last episode when looking for my Razor Claw that I couldn't see the cave entrance for it while playing at night (which I didn't realize would be an issue otherwise I'd have changed my computer time). Luckily the miracle of youtube showed me, but now I wonder how many other things I missed because I played an area at night.

ah how quickly they forget

so that hasn't been a focus lately because this is the first time in a while that i've heard that feedback... and it may just be that cave on the side of the island which was meant to be a bit subtle but i don't think players should be having to change their clocks to see it. 

we actually used to have a pretty significant issue with night-time visibility, especially during rain and god forbid storm, so we ended up lightening all of those things several times over. I got a lot of complaints back then that it was barely possible to even see the old city streets under those conditions so that was awkward.. especially since those were the Essentials defaults. I never had much issue with it personally but I also know that not everyone has good color vision... anyway I was really hoping this wouldn't be an issue again after lightening night so much to the point that it barely feels nightly at all. 

I don't really want to go lighter on that than we already have, and most of those caves are already using a very dark black... which means the solution would probably be adding a highlight around the door area so that there's at least some lighter shades to reflect the night tint off of. if this continues to be an issue then i'll go for that.

our next questions are fairly similar, coming from AielandOfSorrow and Tyranitartar2004 

Hearing about how you've made some of the past areas or developed things in general would be good I think.

I've always been curious about your general design process for creating story content, area designs and quests. So I wouldn't mind  a few posts being dedicated to explaining this.

Admittedly when I first polled I was hoping for some more specific things ^^; But it's okay. Unfortunately far from several posts I don't have much of a process at all as hasn't already been made apparent over the past some months, but I'll go over my steps for making an area. 

I usually have some idea of what I want to do for the area in the first place because of the map, so the first thing to figure out is what the area's gimmick will be. Usually it's a puzzle. I think it's best to keep places more interesting than just a straight walkthrough because there's a million of those in a million other games and nobody needs that. Pretty Line Syndrome is fate, but also must be subtler. 

So to figure out what I can do I'm usually thinking of what kind of natural obstacles there would be, if there are any puzzle types I like from other games that I haven't used, or my peresonal preference of what can be done with the Pokemon that might live in the area. I figure since this is a Pokemon game it makes sense to use puzzles themed around them, since this is naturally the only kind of game in which that could be the case. Originality. Or something. Wow.

Then I have to sketch it. I mean... I have to sketch it. I've tried making areas without doing sketches and it's just hard to think of how to build it out. Usually my sketches only go to the extent of some vague shaped boxes representing different rooms or maps. Maybe some squiggly lines or marks for doors or ledges, and I'm thinking about what path I want the player to take through the area. I might still have some sketches from older areas and if so I'll see if I can find or post them someday. Don't expect much. Sometimes I also count out the dimensions of each room/map on paper if it's something tricky like the desert.

I showed you guys this next piece with the desert too but then I throw down some very rough outlines in the editor. Usually it's like a box of tiles, or some junk tiles drawn in a vague squiggle around where the cliffs will be, or something. Just something to get me started. Getting started is always the hardest part.

Then I start refining it and build a proper outline, like an outline of the area the player can walk in down to the weird curve of the cliff. I'll just use the cliff corners for this and then fill them in later. Then fix up whatever needs to be in the middle. Then do the outside where the player can't reach with trees or more godforsaken cliffs, who knows. 

Once the map is done, it's eventing. Eventing has several pieces in no particular order:

• Teleport events in and out of the map
• Make the puzzle actually function (this is usually the only tricky part)
• Item rewards
• Hidden Items
• Metadata for the game to know things about the map like where is it and can the player bike here
• What Pokemon can be Encountered
• NPCs
• Whatever other random-ass stuff needs to happen here

• Story stuff eventually maybe I guess after everything else is done

As for creating quests the how of making them falls into general eventing, and the how I decide what to make... hm... Well I guess there's a few ways to go. Most of the time I have a reward like a new pokemon or unused item or something and I want to make something for it so I just brainstorm until something sticks. With pseudos and starters I have kind of a personal three-challenge rule I don't stick to at all. 

By that I mean... Okay, so like, uh, Piplup event, right? First challenge is to find the candy. Second challenge is to beat the guy who steals the candy. Third challenge is to find the guy who wants the candy. ...is there a treecko event?? i can't remember it at all but it's marked as having one. weird. uhm, what else... Tepig. Find the Tepig. Chase the tepig through the mountain. Catch the Tepig. You get the idea. 

Other times the quests make themselves. One example of this was the caged pokemon puzzle from Blacksteam Factory. After that episode a lot of people were like "But we can save the Pokemon right??? :(((" and so that became its own sidequest later. Another example would the broken-ass Igglybuff dealio. Like this woman said at the start of the game to keep her Igglybuff safe so it only makes sense she'd want it back later. This episode there was a certain NPC I was writing and I kept thinking "well this person really seems like they could use some help" so I decided to make a small quest out of it even though I didn't really have much of a reward for that... I don't even remember what I ended up doing for that. I hope it was good. Or anything at all... 

I'd like to say story stuff has a process because I am pretty interested in narrative structure and doing things like that in the way that is going to be most effective. Unfortunately Reborn is a fucktruck and all the characters existed before the story and we have a silent protagonist so basically everything I know and believe is useless and the game writes itself. I'm still upset about that. I probably will be for decades to come. 

But it's worked out I guess.