the discrepancy between ideal and reality is a chasm cut by imagination (Patreon)

it begins
while trying to work on stuff my computer has crashed like 5? 6? times today. fortunately, due to the magic of compulsive saving and sheer luck, i haven't lost much of anything at all from the crashes. but it is annoying. and eats time. and shaves a few months off my life each time because i like to listen to music as i work but when it crashes music glitches and just becomes bzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ-- and a panic occurs
maybe the only thing that got me through DDLC was my sheer sense of sadism.
or monika.
either way.

that does not stop me from trudging forward
what does stop me from trudging forward.... temporarily... is having to make a lot of adjustments to this puzzle.
i mentioned at some point last month or so that this might be my favorite puzzle concept in the game... and that that was subject to change based on execution.
the execution has definitely not been my favorite.
i had to cut out a significant part of what had me so excited about the puzzle because of the possibility of the player becoming stuck in it. ....you'd have to be a bit dumb to get stuck in it... but the possibility was there nonetheless and so it was inevitably going to happen. what i had to cut out makes the whole thing much less interesting but despite my best efforts pokemon as a game is not built for quick exits like that without making it very awkward.
i've also had to add a pretty awkward seam to the map loading because of essentials limitations.
ugh.

by the way i'm taking notes on all of this as i go again so that i can post about it in more detail after the episode is out
like with the scrapyard
...is what i'd really like to say if i had posted the scrapyard already
and if i had the files with me you bet your buttons i would have
so i continue to be upset with myself for that xd
but i'll get that probably when back in town + continuing story stuff
since how 2 post about story

as for progress on current puzzle i have pretty much everything done except the meat of it, which is the most tedious, but now most straight-forward part. i think i will try to knock it out all at once to minimize suffering. the good news is that this puzzle/area is the singular most daunting thing left in the episode so it's pretty much a straight shot after that
...the bad news is that i will probably run into my event cap in the process of doing it which means that it might lag a bit despite my best efforts.
which is somehow surprising since i've been trying to be mindful of that at each step
and i've even found a better way to manage the events in this kind of puzzle* than i had last episode
since this puzzle is somewhat similar to the scrapyard in how the player is asked to move large object around-- but that means moving a lot of blocker events around too. in E17 scrapyard i had a rather inefficient solution of just having them appear in the new location as a separate event based on a switch trigger, which is the simple way for single events but for many of them is eeeeh
the current way i'm doing now uses a separate controller event to relocate the events from their original position based on the same variable-- effectively halving the number of events in use
...the only reason i'll still hit the cap is cuz i have a lot more such objects
which i really hate having to downscale puzzles due to editor limitations but
such is life i guess. 

there were at least 18 other things i wanted to talk about in this post but i don't remember any of them anymore so good night