Level Up! probably? (Patreon)

what do you think it feels like when a party member levels up in a traditional RPG and they, say, learn a new skill? 

the way i've always imagined it is like off-screen or in the background or as they walk around the overworld or something they've been like experimenting trying that new spell, like say a mage is learning Fireball maybe they're just casually throwing sparks at enemy whenever they can to try and practice and get the hang of it. And then when the player sees that the spell has been learned, that's when they've mastered it, and can finally just reliably do it every time. 

I think the alternative of this is just them having like a sudden divine moment of clarity and being like, "oh wait, i suddenly know how to do this thing," which is neither especially realistic nor does it make sense to me personally,

and yet despite that i think that second case just happened to me yesterday. 

not that i learned Fireball or anything.... that'd be rad as hekkkk tho

i don't know if i've talked about this here or anywhere else before but i think of a lot of IRL skills in terms of levels. and I know I've mentioned this in tweets in the distant past but there are a lot of things that I think people don't realize are skills. some of those skills might include: getting out bed quickly, setting personal boundaries, having the endurance to work a difficult job... so on. most things are probably skills, i think. 

it could also just be that i'm a game designer with a one track mind. i dunno. i wouldn't know about anything like that.........

and what do level-ups in -those- cases feel like compared to a mage learning fireball in-game? for the esoteric self-regulating skills i mentioned above, i'm not quite sure yet. i'll have to think about that. 

how about for some more practical skills?: art, humor, writing... in these cases, i think it's when you consciously learn a better or new way to do things. for example, art, maybe you level up when you realized how to think about hair in terms of depth despite the flat appearance it's usually drawn with. humor, maybe your level up is when you realize how to use understatement to casualize sentences to a ridiculous point. in writing maybe it's when you realize you should vary your sentences' lengths so you don't end up with three run on sentences in a row in list form creating a really long paragraph that's both daunting and clunky to read. 

but i wouldn't know anything about that one either.

..anyway those are the cases where i think, when one recognizes that kind of thing, oh, that was a Level Up just then. 

and also, since i've been working with RPG Maker for 14 years, I often wonder what I could possibly have left to learn. after all that time, i'm a pretty high level... but am i max level? is there a max level?

so there i was yesterday happily debugging along and I had a sudden feeling like
ctrl+enter is a keyboard shortcut to save and close an event
which would have saved me a ton of time because I had to go through and switch a setting on like 50+ events.
but i had no idea if that was actually the case, and I had no reason to have thought something like that just then. it just kind of came to me.
so i tried it.
and sure enough, it worked.

so i guess that's my RPG Maker Level Up. that's neat.
maybe the fireball does just spontaneously come to the mage.

the depressing alternative is that I had actually known that before and forgot, and rather than learning it just then I just spontaneously remembered. i have no memory of hearing that before... but what else is new.
so let's go ahead and say i just learned it, for my sake. 

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all non-script things are fixed now, but there's still a lot of script stuff... and a lot of it is not AI. maybe i'll make a larger post about what our remaining known bugs are tomorrow.