The eighteen create-scheme (Patreon)

it is, of course, my hope that E18 will not take a year.
this is the folly man dreams of-- fantasies fated to slay them by the blade of their own hubris,
but i have said that about literally every episode since the first, hoping it would not take as long, and I think it has never been the case.
so you know fuck me sideways or whatever

I'll be putting this up on the dev of blogs in the near-to-distant future in less detail but you guys get first call on the dream scheme for E18, here's what we're looking at for goal categories this time around:

• USUM Updates--
  Tutors, trainers' movesets, egg moves, new Pokemon and formes, and new (Z-)moves. fortunately! it's not that much. which is good. because my heart depends on it. implementing this will actually be fairly quick aside from the sprites-- so you know. more streams of that kind coming up -wink-
• AI--
  I've talked about this a bit already cuz y'all know I got a bit of a head start on it. There are 350 function codes in the game and E17 updated 120 of them so now we have the other 230 to go. In addition to that, we'll be reworking priority handling (fairly minor) and potion-handling (not at all minor).
  It's because of AI that E17 had to be tested for almost three months, and unfortunately the same will probably be true for E18 as a result. but whatever, at least i know to expect it this time.
• Maps--
  E18 will have four main areas I need to map. For contrast, remember that E17 had seven. Also, one of them was a big-ass desert. there will be no more big-ass deserts in my future, thank you.
  I have a bit of a dilemma in regards to this and what I show here though, and I'm interested on input about it. During E17's development, I had no problem showing you guys things from Tourmaline, Teknite, Sugiline, the Scrapyard and the Mirage Tower because everyone already knew from the end of E16 that we'd be going out to explore those areas. As of the end of E17 though, we don't necessarily know any such thing. Soooo if I were really dedicated to not spoiling things I wouldn't mention any of the areas I'm working on, let alone show or stream them. But that kind of sucks too.
  So maybe I tag some posts/streams as semi-spoilering and go ahead and show/talk about the first area or two you'll visit even though it gives some direction away, and leave the others out. I dunno, what do you think?
• Eventing--
  ezvent ezlife, i'm not really concerned about this piece and it likely won't take very long either. I don't forsee the puzzles I have planned being very difficult to implement-- but then again that will depend on how I choose to do those so eeeehhhhh. whatever.
• Story--
  so E16 was sidequest-focused. E17 was exploration-focused. E18 will be story-focused. we haven't really had one of those since E15 tbh, but it's similar to that after all.
  that said, a bit tedious as people who've played and read much about E17 know, because branches are now an actual active clusterfuck so all my story-related work from here on out is almost effectively doubled. shuckles.
• Sidequests--
  unlike E17 and 16, I don't have a bunch of sidequest areas to do this time. A couple small ones-- sure, but like one sidequest dungeon available for E18 was actually made and finished back in E16, it just hasn't been available yet. the quests i do have to implement will be just a little out of the way, but no big commitments.
  probably.
• Misc Updates--
  This is a catch-all category as usual, I just fill it up as we go back and make past changes to the game or fix bugs. That said I've tried to limit my past-tweaking since perfectionism and revision slows development down more than anything else, and I really just have a handful of things to do here right now, most of which are thinking about how late certain pokemon are, such as vikavolt and magmortar. might as well disregard this category for the time being.

So! In short the actual development work for E18 will not be too bad but I have to jump the AI hurdle before then... USUM too but i'm honestly less concerned about that.
thinking about it maybe I would actually start mapping before doing USUM sprites and stuff that way i can get the mappers going early too.
eh, we'll see.

also, I want to talk a bit about Gen 8 pre-emptively here. so I guess there are those rumours flying around that it has a simplified, real time battle system, and let me tell you if that is true I am all about that. Those who know me know that I dislike slow turn-based systems in general, and I think that the Pokemon series is severely handicapped by its 1990's-era combat and I would be very happy if they took the risk to modernize it-- even if they don't get it totally right at first.
i know that is an unpopular opinion and a lot of people are wary about this change.
but it's about the only thing they could do at this point to keep me interested in the series tbh. so go them.

that's why I'll be reworking the entire battle system in Reborn to match gen 8 style when it comes out--
no, just kidding. i may be crazy, but i'm not insane. 

in fact, although i absolutely want them to go through with this, i will probably not be implementing gen 8 into reborn. i gotta draw a line somewhere and this new-game-every-year stuff is tough kicks. no lie dudes, i sometimes have nightmares about new gens being released ^^; 

so yeah, USUM will probably be the last games' content officially implemented to reborn. it hurts me a bit to say that because it feels like giving up, since i'm always much less interested in playing a fangame or romhack when it doesn't have all the pokemon or isn't up to date and i really wanted to have the finished product fully-loaded even if it was just for a while. but. it's not practical for me to continue chasing this moving target especially when i'm already spending a lot of time and energy into the AI and animaitons where most fangame devs don't (and maybe someone can leapfrog off of my work anyway...go jan!!!) but. line is drawn for my own sanity.
plus there'll always be chance for people to make mods, so i guess there's that.

so that's gameplan. time to play.