Tales of Buggo: Sloth of the Frost King (Patreon)

the issue: in E16, sometimes Blake and/or Shelly disappear to never be seen again. in other cases, they disappear at bizarre times, start in the wrong situation, don't give the player waterfall, etc. this happens in both branches, and has caused a hecktonne lot of reports on the forum with people who's save file need to be fixed because they literally can't progress the game. 

the cause: when i first read the reports for this months ago i was pretty confusion because I hadn't edited that part of the story sequence at all, and it was working in E15 no prob to the blemo. so i was just kind of staring at the reports all episode long like ?????????????? because I wasn't tackling the issue until just a few days ago and I had no idea what might have done that. 

I had actually changed Blake's movement a bit so that he forcibly takes the ring instead of making the player give it to him in return for Shelly (which especially after Charlotte's stunt was just, not a good idea), so I was thinking maybe I managed to hecc something up there but that didn't really make sense since that event often wasn't triggering at all

Meanwhile other people didn't have any trouble at all so what's the big ikea??

Well, I was ready to spend a lot of time looking at this and trying to figure out exactly what the problem with various saves, but it turned out none of that was necessary at all. I took a look at one save and saw everything I needed to. In an 80's film death-flash back sequence that would make even Jim Sharman cringe, I suddenly remembered what I had done and what I needed to do.

Okay, so if you look at the game's events and stuff you'll notice than episode 1 I have a million disjointed switches for eberything in the story like there's a switch for going to mosswater there's a switch for getting your Pokemon there's a switch for blowing up mosswater etc and it's a disaster. I had no business doing things that way but in my defense it had been several years since I had worked on any games before starting this project and I had forgotten the old ways.

The old ways became the new ways and starting in like episode 3, maybe 4? I saved myself a whole lot of switches by picking up a Story Variable for each episode. So like, there's a single variable that controls the entire flow of events for each chapter of the game. I think this is the best way to do it because although that's still a good chunk of variables I don't have nearly as many of those in use as I do switches, not that they're finite, but if something messes up and the story value is set to the wrong number it doesn't break the entire game, just part of it.

So I had this save file on which Blake and Shelly were missing and I'm looking at the story variable. My expectation was that something wasn't getting set properly so it wasn't reaching a high enough value to trigger their appearance. I was wrong. Turns out it was actually too high. What????

And then it hit me like a 4x Mach Punch.

Okay, so let's talk about E14 (Ametrine + Terra)'s story flow. You get to Ametrine and the first thing you gotta do is talk to a bunch of people and find out what's up with Heather. So in E14 this was kind of tedious because there were about 8 people to talk to and it's not like each of their information was crucial... More importantly most players would miss like, one person and then have to talk to everyone to figure out who the 31st Student was. 

So, before E16 I made it so you didn't have to talk to -all- of them, just like, 5 or so. My hope was that this would eliminate the cases of people feeling like they had to comb the town just because they missed one or two people. Makes that story flow a little smoother. Ya feel? Ya feel. 

That is what caused the bug with Blake and Shelly disappearing, and all these other problems around there.

Each of those NPCs adds +1 to the E14 story variable when you talk to them. Originally the story continued in Eve and Lumi's house when your story variable was at least 8... changed to 6. Then the events in that house boost it up a bit more, and then it's expected to be like, 14 to meet Blake.

Buuuuut if you didn't talk to one of those original NPCs before, and then you talk to them -after- doing the stuff at the house, they would still boost the story variable once. 14 becomes 15 and suddenly Blake's gone becuase the game thinks you already met him. Or whatever.

the solution: we just have those NPCs say all the same stuff, but we don't increase the story variable if it's already so high that the game knows you've been to the house. super duper simple stuff. that problem could have taken a lot of different forms depending on when people talked to those left over NPCs, but this cleans up all of them without issue. case cucking closed. 

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unrelated PS @ Aie thanks for making that report about the pyrous absol because i totally forgot one was supposed to be there at all and i might have never noticed again