irrelevants (Patreon)

here are a few things that don't matter, and were not planned, but happened anyway:

updated splash screen, much cleaner than the previous, plus background

titania-themed windowskin. it's... a little bit strange. when i originally did these i did one for like, every leader, except for titania and...

...one for luna.

i'm not really...sure how or why those two were skipped but uh. they exist now! suddenly.
for no particular reason.

and here's the part where i practice the whole vulnerability thing again:

it's been a difficult past twenty four hours or so. i had to let go of a good friend, and subsequently team member. so... there's no need to really worry about that last part as far impact to development goes. there was little enough for them in particular to do this episode that it won't be much of an issue at all. still hurts. and i'm awful at doing that kind of thing.

the above assets are all changes/improvements that they took the initiative and brunt of the work on. i cleaned each of them up and have added them now.
they are also the tip of the iceberg.
and this was a problem for me.

before continuing i should be clear it's not my intent here to badmouth anyone. i'm just speaking about my conflicts within development for the sake of... i don't know what. because that's the kind of honesty i believe in, i guess.
these things i'm describing here also aren't a major reason why anything today happened.

anyway there were a lot of things like this, like little side additions or improvements or god knows what's that would come out of the woodwork that they'd suggest-- and push-- for adding. sometimes there were strings attached to saying no. it became pretty difficult to get an answer across. sometimes they just went for it anyway.

and so, while i certainly don't mean to say that i don't want this game to be the best it can be, it was becoming increasingly clear that our goals or expectations for development were a bit different.

i just want to get this game finished for you guys. 

if there are graphical improvements or features to be added, we can do that after the main debt of the work is settled-- rather than putting it off with such things which i strongly believe are a large part of why past episodes have taken so long. i want to focus directly on finishing the game's story, and then we can consider improving it from there.

nevertheless, we have new windowskins and a new splash screen.
which is honestly fine, cool, those things don't take much time to handle.
but like...
no, i'm... not going to have marcello put off working on AI to code in custom text colors per theme.
no i'm not going to suddenly design and implement a 2d non-touch version of pokemon amie
no i'm not going to add cosplay pikachu-- frankly that's not worth my time or anybody else's
(sorry to any cosplay pikachu fans out there-- but only a little bit).

so i've been a bit frustrated with the increasing frequency of these suggestions. it's been like an every-other-day thing. and it felt like they were pulling me away from staying  on track to finish this.
i didn't mean what happened today to be a solution to that, but i guess it was. 

so this has been an ordeal but for a positive spin we'll say i've learned something.
maybe that's that there may be such a thing as being too passionate for a project. or that i need to really understand people better before i bring them on. or that i just need to get better at telling people 'no' no matter what they have staked in it.
or maybe all of those at once.
i'll figure it out.

in the mean time, new windowskins are nice.