Supervised Testing, Day 2 (Patreon)

day 1 was all fun and games aside from a few bumps in the road, but man, yesterday was kind of brutal. it's because there were hardly any trainers in yesterday's testing, but we got to them today. to be perfectly honest, I am profoundly disappointed in the AI. 

it's not as if i expected it to be perfect off the bat-- certainly not. like, in a battle in day 1 the AI threw a sweep by trying to greed for set up but you know, like, I'm cool with that, because now that we have the structure for it in place, I can just tweak the numbers for set up moves to be a little lower if the opponent could be kill't. that's fine.

what is not fine is when the opponent uses Aqua Jet instead of Earthquake on an opponent that is definitely slower than it and is a water type. this is basic stuff. what?????? idk. i'm shook, dudes. and it's like-- it's a lot frustrating than it was before because before it's like 

oh, that silly AI! we still haven't redone it yet, but believe me, once we do...

and now it's like

what?? what is wrong with you?! I RAISED YOU TO BE BETTER THAN THIS.

and it's frustrating because who knows what the fuck is going on in the rough damage method that makes it think that is even a remotely good idea. i can't even imagine why. i hope to god it's just a typo but that has got to be one hell of a typo if so. 

so. i'm just. grrrrrrrrrr. 

AI is broken in some other strange ways too. for instance there's one trainer that has a lickilicky... and... man... you KO that thing and the AI just sends it right back out. 0 HP and everything. "Lickilicky doesn't have the will to battle!" bruh honeybadger don't give a shit you get back out there Lickilicky

Marcello spent quite a bit of time already trying to solve cases like that so I think he's also pretty disheartened that it still happened. But we'll... we'll give it a good licking yet. or something.

Other issues. Like yesterday, there were a solid couple crashes caused just by me mis-entering an item name. apparently it's not "EeveeiumZ." who knew? everyone? well, all right. the group favorite, however, was when i had typo'd "Big Mushroom" as "Bug Mushroom" thereby not only crashing the game but also inciting a karmic loop that I believe will likely one day become the denotation of 'hitsuzen'.

in the end, yesterday's session took about another 7 hours, which is definitely more than i expected especially considering it was on speed up most of the time (day 1 too though). It might a bit less than that not counting the time Ikaru spent just trying to find a way to beat the gym leader, since his team was pretty bad against the type... 

tbh he got mad. he ended up catching/"raising"* a bunch of pokemon that beat the type and bringing a full team of them in just to say 'fuck you'. he still lost a couple times, but it eventually worked. he also had to find a certain item to do it and i'm proud to say i (eventually) remembered where i had put it! check me out! remembering things, two days in a row! im practically a remembering machine. 

* by 'raising' i mean he used debug mode to set their level to his own team's.

that was not the only time he got mad either. there's a new quest where you have to give a certain pokemon to an NPC, and boy howdy did that NPC piss him off. so he's got this pokemon right, and he has to turn it in, only the pokemon he had for it happened to be shiny. well ikaru's not having that. 

he pulls up debug mode, adds a new one of the same species, makes specifically sure it's not shiny... sets it to level 1... sets it to the worst nature and ability possible... sets it to 1 HP and burned status... sets ALL of its IVs to 0. and THEN turns it in,

begrudgingly, still. i continue to struggle to breathe through the cacophony of laughter i am oft known to produce. the NPC, of course, has no choice but to happily accept. 

anyway, all said and done, Ikaru described the episode like this: "that was really cool, but I disliked all of it." 

This is about what I was going for, so I consider that description a great success.

Inuki, who also was along for the ride with us again, described it like this: 

All right, look.
Imagine, you're just a happy 14 year old
And you're coming home from school one day-- and it's been tough, maybe some bullies shoved you into a locker or something, you know, it's- it's a hard life,
So you come home from school, and you wanna play your favorite game, Pokemon Reborn.
It just released a brand new episode, and you're excited to play, you download it, you come here, and then THIS SHIT happens it's like you just get SLAPPED in the face by someone and they just run off--
Yeah, no, you just get SLAPPED IN THE FACE WITH A TUNA.
Like this:

(context for that here and here)

This is about what I was going for, so I consider that description a great success. 

But the AI makes me want to die.